Citations with no bibliography at the end

Question

How do you produce a document with citations (\citep, \citet) working properly in the paper but without a bibliography at the end?

I've come up with one solution that is bad because it breaks my makefile.

latex file.tex
bibtex file
# comment out \bibliography{} command
latex file.tex

Similarly, is there a way to produce the bibliography with no accompanying text? Again, I've come up with a solution: fill an otherwise blank .tex file with \nocite{} commands. However, this is a pain because I have to keep two files synced by hand (and regular expressions to search for \citep{author1, author2} can be a huge pain when there are pagebreaks...).

Answer 1

Your second request is easy: use \nocite{*}. This will produce a full bibliography, regardless of which bibliography entries are actually cited.

Answer 2

You can define a savebox and put the \bibliography command inside the savebox.

Here is a small example:

\RequirePackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@book{test,
author={Name},
title={TITLE},
year={2011},
}
\end{filecontents}
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{natbib}
\bibliographystyle{plainnat}
\begin{document}
\cite{test}

\newsavebox\mytempbib
\savebox\mytempbib{\parbox{\textwidth}{\bibliography{test}}}

\end{document}

NOTE: If you are using biblatex you don't need such hacks.

EDIT

In relation to my answer I have a small question. What do you think about a small package which allows the user to print the bibliography or not?

Here my first try:

%% Copyright (C) 2011 by Marco Daniel
\ProvidesPackage{nobibprint}[2011/10/12 v0.1 nobibprint]
\RequirePackage{etoolbox}
\RequirePackage{xkeyval}
\define@boolkey{nobibprint.sty}[nobib@]{hide}{}
\ExecuteOptionsX{hide=true}
\ProcessOptionsX
\newsavebox\nobib@tempbox
\ifnobib@hide
   \AtBeginDocument{%
     \let\nobib@bibliography@orig\bibliography
     \def\bibliography#1{%
        \savebox\nobib@tempbox{%
           \parbox{\linewidth}{%
              \nobib@bibliography@orig{#1}%
            }%
        }%
      }%
   }
\fi
\endinput

Now simple use:

\usepackage{nobibprint}

or:

\usepackage[hide=true]{nobibprint}%default

or

\usepackage[hide=false]{nobibprint}

Answer 3

If you put the \bibliography command in a file, say bibcommand.tex and in the main file you say

\documentclass{book}
...
%\includeonly{}
...

\begin{document}
<the document>

\include{bibcommand}

\end{document}

then a normal compilation will include the bibliography, but commenting out \includeonly{} will omit it.

You can also add the \includeonly{} from the shell

latex "\includeonly{}\input{filename}"

(where your main file is filename.tex) and this may be included in a Makefile, I believe.

Answer 4

Simply use biblatex and its natbib compatibility option.

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage[style=authoryear,natbib=true]{biblatex}

\usepackage{filecontents}

\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@misc{A01,
  author = {Author, A.},
  year = {2001},
  title = {Alpha},
}
\end{filecontents}

\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}

\begin{document}

Some text \citep{A01}.

% \printbibliography

\end{document}

Answer 5

Your makefile can empty the *.bbl file. If you want to use Konrad's suggestion to separately compile the bibliography, you can try the following (untested):

file.dvi: file.tex
        latex file
        bibtex file
        mv -f file.bbl references.bbl; touch file.bbl
        latex file
        latex references

where references.tex is the Latex file that invokes \nocite{*}.