How to change font size for bibliography?

Question

I want to use a smaller font size for the bibliography, e.g., \footnotesize. What is the easiest way to achieve this? I currently do \renewenvironment{thebibliography}... and copy the definition from report.cls but with the \footnotesize inserted in. However, that seems to be a bit of a hack, so I'm looking for a cleaner way.

Answer 1

First I have to say that you should avoid fiddling with font sizes in order to squish more text into a document. Conferences and journals often discourage such formatting hacks; some might even reject papers found to be doing this.

Anyway, if you still need to to this for whatever reason, the easiest way I found is to write something like

{\footnotesize
\bibliography{bibfile}}

Answer 2

And if you use the natbib package:

\def\bibfont{\footnotesize}

Answer 3

Using the biblatex package you could also write

\renewcommand*{\bibfont}{\footnotesize}

(Personally I'd use \small instead of \footnotesize.)

Answer 4

Using beamer+biblatex you could also write

\frame[shrink=50] {\printbibliography}