Problems with bibliography and references in TexWorks

Question

I am writing a report in Latex, and I have the references in a separate bib file and I reference them in my main document as \cite{xxx}.

I am using Texworks on Windows. After compiling the bib to generate a bbl, when I compile the tex file with: "pdflatex + MakeIndex + BibTex", I am able to see the pdf the report, but I do not see the Bibilography section at the end and do not see references to the bibliography, not even question marks instead of the proper references to the bibliography.

I include the bibliography by typing

 \bibliography{plain}

and

 \bibliography{"C:/Users/BibName"}

at the end of the tex file

I then tried pdflatex + bibtex + pdflatex + pdflatex. When I tried that, the 'References' section shows up at the end, but I do not see the references, such as

1. Reinhard, D.A. Case Study

I also do not see the citation in the paper

Here is the MWE: The tex is:

\documentclass{article}  
\begin{document}  
Alpha particles \cite{example} (named after and denoted by the first letter in the
Greek alphabet,\[\alpha\]) consist of two protons and two neutrons bound
together.
This means that an particle is a helium nucleus. 

\bibliography{plain}
\bibliographystyle{plain}
\bibliography{BibName}

\end{document}

The bib is:

@article{example,
  author = {Knuth, Donald E.},
  year = {1986},
  title = {The \TeX book},
}

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

\bibliography{<file>} denotes the name of the <file>.bib that contains your BibTeX references, while \bibliographystyle{<bibstyle>} denotes the style you want your references displayed in. You clearly want one \bibliography only:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents*}{references.bib}
@article{example,
  author = {Knuth, Donald E.},
  year = {1986},
  title = {The {\TeX} book},
}
\end{filecontents*}

\begin{document}  
Alpha particles~\cite{example} (named after and denoted by the first letter in the
Greek alphabet,~$\alpha$) consist of two protons and two neutrons bound
together. This means that an particle is a helium nucleus. 

\bibliographystyle{plain}
\bibliography{references}

\end{document}

Answer 2

Maybe this helps (something really basic that maybe you already did, but if don't it can crack your head off).

Try avoiding spaces in names of .tex and .bib, both. It generates names with spaces also in .aux, .bbl etc.

I had the same problem: Long .tex and .bib files with a final .pdf with question marks instead of referencies, and messages like Warning--I didn't find a database entry for "XXXX" and Package natbib Warning: There were undefined citations.. No .bbl at all and no answer about when surfing the web.

At the end, I just copy/paste everything to a new folder in new files (trying to avoid unknown characters) and changed even names. It magically worked just because the new name didn't have spaces (test.tex instead of pritty work for my lovely boss v_342.tex).

N. of R.: I'm working under Windows and this happend to me only using TeXworks. In an old PC (also under Windows plattform), that I don't use because it has less reaction than a slug, it works perfectly even with spaces in names, so I suppose that is because I had TeXnicCenter in my old PC. BTW, using TeXnicCenter you just have to compile several times but with a unique compiling option (LaTeX=>PDF); using TeXworks you have to compile with pdfLaTeX, then with BibTeX and finally twice with pdfLaTex again, always the .tex file.