How to completely omit any bibliography header (komascript, bibunits)

Question

Using scrbook, I would like to generate several bibliographies with bibunits. Each time, I would like to control manually whether creating a new section or not, whether creating a title etc. In other words, I would like to prevent the putbib command to create any header whatsoever.

So far I only managed that (really without having a clue what I am doing here) by using etoolbox:

After each

\begin{bibunit}

I add

\makeatletter
\patchcmd{\thebibliography}{\bib@heading}{}{}{}
\makeatother

which seems to do the trick (but again, I really have no idea what I am doing).

My quesitons: Is this code reasonably sane? Or will it have horrible side effects that I am not aware of? Is there any better way to produce a bibliography without header?

(Sometimes people seem to set the title to \vspace-2ex or whatever, but this will not prevent a pagebreak in the cases the \section* command called by the bibliography creates one)

Answer 1

(Sorry in case it is bad style to "answer" your own question, in particular since it is rather a biblatex field report than an answer. But maybe it turns out to be useful for somebody in a similar situation.)

1. It seems that the solution I used was fine and did not have any other horrible side effects.

2. However, in the end I ended up switching to biblatex/biber, just as recommended by @jon. I was reluctant to do so in the first place, as it was clear to me I would lose a day or two just to make the transition (which turned out to be the case).

   Just for completeness, in the end I could switch without having to change the bib files at all, but I had to use the options maxbibnames=6 (to prevent too much et.al.), backend=biber (for some reasons bibtex wasn't working well) and, most crucially, safeinputenc (to prevent weird problems eith utf8 inputenc; accordingly biber is called with the switch --output_safecharsset=full).

   Once you manage to get things to work, you end up with a clearly superior system that allows easy additions, which would be a terrible nightmare if not impossible with my old bibunits/bibtex setup, such as:

   • omit all headers using \printbibliography[heading=none]
   • "countdown" lists for the cv, with a defbibenvironment using etaremune and \newrefcontext[sorting=ydnt]
   • Add multiple tags for the same bib-file-entry using the IDS field
   • Select only bib entries that have a certain keyword

So to summarize: If you have any nonstandard bibliography needs (and control over how the bibliography is handled, which is usually not the case when you submit a paper to a journal) I now would also strongly recomment to use biblatex/biber (but you should be aware that you may need a whole day to make the transition work; you do not expect problems such as safeinputenc before they hit you)