Internal bibliography with biblatex

Question

I would like to have a paper's bibliography entries inside its .tex file instead of outside in a .bib file. Is this possible with biblatex?

My reason for asking this is that I want to find the most convenient way to produce documents that uses biblatex from just one file to make collaboration on papers easier and to be able to handle submissions of papers to journals.

Answer 1

Not really. You can use the filecontents* environment. Put

\begin{filecontents*}{database.bib}
<the bibliography database>
\end{filecontents*}

in the preamble (before \documentclass) and the database.bib file will be created if not already existent. This is the most convenient way to pack everything needed in a unique .tex file.

The filecontents* environment differs from filecontents in that the former doesn't add any initial comments, which could confuse bibtex or biber.

As mentioned by Gonzalo Medina, the filecontents package lifts some restriction about these environments, allowing for example to put them anywhere in the file. Notice that, with this package, existent files will be overwritten.

Answer 2

The Journals of Elsevier recommend:

• Open the bbl file; there, you'll see something like that:

  \begin{thebibliography}{number_of_bibliography_entries}
  
  bibliography entries
  
  \end{thebibliography}
  

• Copy all the content in these file;

• Paste the content in your tex file, replacing thebibliography environment.

After that you can define your bibliography style, as example:

\bibliographystyle{plainnat} (if you use natbib).

I hope you can solve your problem.

Answer 3

I don't know about BibLaTeX specifically, but you can do it with BibTeX, although it is sort of silly. BibTeX ignores all text outside of @foo{...}. So what you can do is you can give your .tex file a .bib extension and put the document followed by a \endinput followed by your bibliography entries. Here's an example.

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
\nocite{th11}
\bibliographystyle{plain}
\bibliography{\jobname}
\end{document}
\endinput

@misc{th11,
        author = {T.H. Me},
        title = {Silliness},
        year = 2011,
        month = jun,
}

One can compile this using the following.

$ pdflatex b.bib
$ bibtex b
$ pdflatex b.bib
$ pdflatex b.bib