How to create a bib list?

Question

I have a .bib file, and I would like to create a single PDF file with "References" in the title and then the list of all papers in the .bib file ordered alphabetically. The style of the bibliography list is not that important.

I could do that easily by creating a .tex file that uses the cite command for all the .bib entries. That could be tedious to update and maintain.

Is there a way to do that without using the \nocite command explicitly?

Answer 1

One possibility is to use the \nocite command with the wildcard character: \nocite{*} which does the same as if you were using \nocite for every entry in your .bib file. Here is a MWE:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@article{A2013,
author = {Author, A},
title = {A nice paper},
journal = {Journal},
year = {2013},
volume = {1},
pages = {1--2},
}
@article{B2013,
author = {Buthor, B},
title = {A wonderful paper},
journal = {Journal},
year = {2013},
volume = {1},
pages = {3--4},
}
@article{C2013,
author = {Cuthor, C},
title = {An amazing paper},
journal = {Journal},
year = {2013},
volume = {1},
pages = {5--6},
}
\end{filecontents}

\begin{document}

\nocite{*}

\bibliographystyle{plain}
\bibliography{\jobname}

\end{document}

And the output:

If your .bib is too large, there are some packages designed just for this, like the biblist or listbib packages. For instance, deleting the \nocite{*} line and adding a \usepackage{biblist} in your preamble, you get: