BibTeX with Plain TeX

Question

The manpage of bibtex says that it can be used with both LaTeX and TeX. However, I did not find any resource how to do it and also no TeX book of mine explains it. Can someone provide a minimalistic example?

Answer 1

You can look at the btxmac.tex from Eplain (usually found in texmf-dist/tex/eplain). It includes an example of use with plain TeX.

Answer 2

Here is the example given in http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb24-1/patashnik.pdf:

\input btxmac

The \TeX{}book~\cite{knuth:tex} is good.
\medskip

\leftline{\bf References}

\bibliography{mybib}

\bibliographystyle{plain}

\bye

There is nothing really special.

Answer 3

The eplain manual describes how to use bibtex with some of the eplain commands. It looks really similar to the way it's done in LaTeX.