[Tex/LaTex] bibliography problem

bibliographiesbibtex

This is what I write with latex:

\documentclass{iserc}

 \begin{document}
 ...
\begin{thebibliography}{1}
\bibliography{my-biblio}
\end{thebibliography}

\end{document}

but when I compile it, it gives me an error:

!Latex error: something's wrong-- perhaps a missing \item

Best Answer

Are you using BibTeX? If so you need to remove the \begin{bibliography} and \end{bibliography}. i.e.

\documentclass{iserc}

\begin{document}
 ...
\bibliographystyle{unsrt} % <- Choose a style. Your document class may do this for you.
\bibliography{my-biblio}

\end{document}

You will need to run pdflatex (or whatever LaTeX variant you use), then bibtex and then pdflatex twice more to get everything settled.

If you are using direct input from a file (this is very unlikely), then use \input{my-biblio} rather than \bibliography{...} and keep the \begin{bibliography} and \end{bibliography}.

Journals commonly ask for your bibliography to be placed directly in the LaTeX document. Perhaps this is where the confusion arose. When you need to do this, use the code above, and when you send it to the journal, copy the contents of the .bbl file and replace the \bibliographystyle{...} and \bibliography{...} lines with the content.

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