What Program do I need to write .bib files and how do I use their contents in my bibliography?

Question

What Program do I need to write .bib files and how do I use their contents to create my bibliography with the help of the additional input of my bst file which I downloaded from http://ftp.math.utah.edu/pub//tex/bibtex/apa.bst (APA style)?

I am running Ubuntu 12.10 if it is relevant.

Answer 1

Let's demonstrate how you can achieve this with biblatex, which comes with in-built support for APA style; technically, we'll actually be using biber, which is a 'backend bibliography processor for biblatex'

We will have the following files in the same directory

myfile.tex

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage[american]{babel}
\usepackage{csquotes}
\usepackage[style=apa]{biblatex}
\DeclareLanguageMapping{american}{american-apa}

\addbibresource{mybib.bib}

\begin{document}

\begin{itemize}
  \item \verb!\cite! \cite{Ab_Steg}
  \item \verb!\textcite! \textcite{Ab_Steg}
  \item \verb!\parencite! \parencite{Ab_Steg}
\end{itemize}

\printbibliography

\end{document}

mybib.bib

@BOOK{Ab_Steg,
 author = "M. Abramowitz and I. A. Stegun",
 title = {Handbook of mathematical functions},
 publisher = "Dover publications",
 year = "1965",
 language="English" }

To compile this, you run

pdflatex myfile
biber myfile
pdflatex myfile
pdflatex myfile

note that each command doesn't have an extension- if you wanted to, you could use the extensions

pdflatex myfile.tex
biber myfile.bcf
pdflatex myfile.tex
pdflatex myfile.tex

This gives the following output

To facilitate this process we can use the excellent arara automation tool to help- we can change myfile.tex to include the following lines

% arara: pdflatex
% arara: biber
% arara: pdflatex
% arara: pdflatex
\documentclass{article}

\usepackage[american]{babel}
\usepackage{csquotes}
\usepackage[style=apa]{biblatex}
\DeclareLanguageMapping{american}{american-apa}

\addbibresource{mybib.bib}

\begin{document}

\begin{itemize}
  \item \verb!\cite! \cite{Ab_Steg}
  \item \verb!\textcite! \textcite{Ab_Steg}
  \item \verb!\parencite! \parencite{Ab_Steg}
\end{itemize}

\printbibliography

\end{document}

which gives

  __ _ _ __ __ _ _ __ __ _ 
 / _` | '__/ _` | '__/ _` |
| (_| | | | (_| | | | (_| |
 \__,_|_|  \__,_|_|  \__,_|

Running PDFLaTeX... SUCCESS
Running Biber... SUCCESS
Running PDFLaTeX... SUCCESS
Running PDFLaTeX... SUCCESS