I'm using \begin{thebibiliography} to generate a bibliography at the end of the page. The heading for this is "References" and I would like to reduce the size of this heading. I'm using the article document class.
[Tex/LaTex] How to reduce the size of the word “References” in the bibliography section
bibliographiesfontsize
Related Solutions
Since you did not say which document class or bibliography packages you're using I will give you a general answer.
A bibliography like this uses a numbered list. The paralist package provides such in-paragraph lists: you could use the inparaenum environment of paralist to get numbered items within a paragraph without linebreaks.
For instance, with article these two redefinitons would achieve it:
\renewenvironment{thebibliography}[1]{%
\section*{\refname}\inparaenum[{[}1{]}]}{\endinparaenum}
\renewcommand{\bibitem}[1]{\item}
The bibliography would then look like:
Further features of paralist may be used for customization.
Edit: here's a minimal example showing it with your example bbl file. Note, I additionally disabled \par temporarily, because the bbl file contains empty lines.
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{paralist}
\renewenvironment{thebibliography}[1]{%
\section*{\refname}%
\let\par\relax\let\newblock\relax%
\inparaenum[{[}1{]}]}{\endinparaenum}
\renewcommand{\bibitem}[1]{\item}
\usepackage{url}
\begin{document}
\nocite{*}
\bibliography{testbib}
\end{document}
Output:
Enclose the thebibliography environment in a group and switch to \footnotesize within the group. EDIT: Or even better, switch to \footnotesize inside the thebibliography environment.
\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
\section{foo}
Some text in \verb|\normalsize| \cite{test}.
\begin{thebibliography}{9}
\footnotesize
\bibitem{test} A bibliography item in \verb|\footnotesize|.
\end{thebibliography}
\end{document}
Best Answer
The simplest way to go is the light usage of
titlesec. As in the article class, the bibliography is a\section, which by default is in\Largesize, you can add this to your preamble: