BibTex and \includeonly command

Question

I have a document of this form

....

\includeonly{main}

\begin{document} 

   \include{main}

   \include{supp}

   \bibliographystyle{plain}
   \bibliography{bibfile}

\end{document}

I need LaTeX to read supp.aux for cross-referencing, but do not want BibTex to read supp.aux. In other words, I do not want to list .bib entries used in supp.tex to be included in the current document. Is there a way to direct BibTex to only look at main.aux and not supp.aux?

Answer 1

If you compile your full document (no \includeonly) and ensure that all the cross references are OK, then you can reistate the \includeonly and LaTeX will load also the .aux files corresponding to the not included files.

Answer 2

I suggest doing like egreg recomends, but before second compilation try deleting generated bibliography file that has the same name as the main file of your project, but has an extension .bbl. This will force bibtex to regenerate it but will exclude supp file.

As I remember, this worked for me when I was writing my master thesis.