How to use .bib file in my own LaTeX file?

Question

I have generated the.bib file of the reference in my paper, but I failed to include it inside my own LaTeX file. I tried to use it like this:

\documentclass[journal]{IEEEtran}
\begin{document}
...
\bibliographystyle{IEEEtran}
\bibliography{IEEEabrv,testing} %testing.bib is my .bib file
\end{document}

But it always got an error like this:

Something's wrong--perhaps a missing \item. \end{thebibliography}

And the PDF generated only had the title 'Reference', and failed to display the detailed citations. My .bib files are downloaded from Microsoft Academic and Google Scholar, so they can't be wrong. What's the solution?

Answer 1

For citing sources using BibTeX, you should use \cite{...}, and when you don't cite any sources, you get an error message like this:

! LaTeX Error: Something's wrong--perhaps a missing \item.

See the LaTeX manual or LaTeX Companion for explanation.
Type  H <return>  for immediate help.
 ...                                              

l.24 \end{thebibliography}

I hereby provide a working example. Adding \usepackage{cite} is optional, but for having the capability of sorting and compression of references, you will need cite package. I have used a single \cite{...}, but If you don't want to cite any sources in the article, you can use \nocite{*} to include all the sources available in your bib file to be included in the list of references.

\documentclass[journal]{IEEEtran}
\usepackage{cite}
\begin{document}

This is a citation\cite{mycite}

\bibliographystyle{IEEEtran}
\bibliography{IEEEabrv,testing} %testing.bib is my .bib file

\end{document}

To compile your file, you should run latex 3 times on your file. Assuming that your file is name document.tex, you should do:

latex document
bibtex document
latex document
latex document

Please note that machine generated bibliography files are sometimes messy, so you may have to edit them manually.