Remove numbers in bibliography

Question

I want to remove the numbers in the bibliography. For example:

FERREIRA, L. P. (Org.). O fonoaudiólogo e a escola. São Paulo: Summus, 1991.

without number. I am trying \bibitem [] {Askey}, but [] appears in the document. Can someone tell me how this is done?

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document} 
Resultados obtidos foram utilizado: Askey (1985),$^{\cite{Askey}}$
\begin{thebibliography}{99} 
   \bibitem [] {Askey} ASKEY, R.; WILSON, J. 
     \emph{Some Basic Hypergeometric Polynomial that Generalize Jacobi Polynomial}. 
      Memoirs of the American Mathematical Society, v. 54, p. 1-55, 1985. 
\end{document} 

Answer 1

The answer really depends on how you have set up your document and how you create your bibliogrphy etc (are you using bibtex, biblatex, ...?).

Any way one solution, which may or may not be appropriate is to add the following to your preamble:

\makeatletter
\def\thebibliography#1{%
  \c@chapter\z@ \c@section\z@\let\chaptername\relax
  \section*{References}\list
  {}{\settowidth\labelwidth{}\leftmargin\labelwidth
  \advance\leftmargin\labelsep
  \itemsep\z@\parsep\z@\topsep\z@\parskip\z@
  \usecounter{enumi}}
  \def\newblock{\hskip .11em plus .33em minus .07em}
  \sloppy\clubpenalty4000\widowpenalty4000
  \sfcode`\.=1000\relax}
\makeatletter

Actually, this solution makes the bibliography more compact, which you mightn't like.

Another solution, that it closer is spirit to what you tried, is to modify \bibitem. If you look at the definition of \bibitem (using, for example, \show), you will see that it calls \@bibtem and this is where the \item command comes from. Hence, you can get what you want with the following:

\makeatletter
\def\@bibitem#1{\item[]%
    \if@filesw\immediate\write\@auxout{\string \bibcite {#1}{\the\value{\@listctr }}}\fi\ignorespaces}
\makeatletter

The difference between these two approaches is the indentation of the bibliography entries. The first attempt produces

whereas the second gives you

The first approach is the more robust and the second may have unintended side-effects, not least because it doesn't cater for the optional argument that \bibitem accepts.