Chicago-biblatex error

Question

I am very new to LaTeX and the world of programming in general, and I am writing my M.A. thesis using LaTeX. The Chicago style is required for my thesis, so I got the biblatex-chicago package. this is an outline of my document:

\documentclass[12pt]{article}

\usepackage[style=chicago-authordate]{biblatex}

\bibliography{refs}

\begin{document}

--then the body of the paper with some citations and the \printbibliography command--

\end{document}

When I run it through BibTeX, I get the following errors:

This is BibTeX, Version 0.99d (TeX Live 2013)

The top-level auxiliary file: Bodhi Ch. 1.aux

I found no \citation commands---while reading file Bodhi Ch. 1.aux

I found no \bibdata command---while reading file Bodhi Ch. 1.aux

I found no \bibstyle command---while reading file Bodhi Ch. 1.aux

(There were 3 error messages)

Also, the bibliography and the citations don't come out, presumably because BibTeX was not able to process the file.

The name of my project is "Bodhi Ch. 1"

Anyone know what this is about?

Answer 1

There are a couple of things here:

1. You are using bibtex instead of what it seems you want to use, biblatex. For this, you first need to change the path to the executable file. I cannot tell you how to do this because I do not know what type of editor you are using, but for example, if using TeXnicCenter it's just a matter of changing this on the profile settings.

2. If you actually want to use bibtex (which I personally prefer... but many folks around here just love biblatex) you need to:

   2.1 Instead of \usepackage[style=chicago-authordate]{biblatex} change it for \usepackage{natbib}

   2.2 You need to create a .bib file which contains the bibliography entries.

   2.3 In order to not get the warnings, you actually need to \cite any of the authors of your .bib file (thus eliminating the problem of not finding \citation commands) , and of course this file should not be empty (thus eliminating the problem of not finding \bibdata and finally you have to set a \bibliographystyle, that since you are using the natbib package mentioned at the beginning, you'll get the options to choose the style you want.

   2.3.1 As it seems the style you need is Chicago, this could be implemented by \bibliographystyle{chicagoa}

3. Now, if you want to use biblatex it is usually recommended to go along with biber. This could be a good starting point: Setting up biber as a default biblatex backend in the configuration file