Group references with BibTeX

Question

I am using BibTeX to maintain my references.

I have a lot of books in my .bib file, but some of the books are my primary sources.

Is it possible to group my references into 'primary sources' and 'secondary sources'?

What I am looking for is to choose to which group each bibtex entry belongs, and then print the grouped references instead of just the default references.

Answer 1

You could try the multibib package. It's difficult to give you a minimal working example, because you would need your .bib files and the multibib.sty to compile, but it would look something like this:

\documentclass{report}

\usepackage{multibib}
\newcites{PS}{Primary Sources}
\newcommand{\bibfile}{/path/to/your/bibfile} 

\begin{document}

The best book to read is \citePS{citation1}. 
Some secondary stuff to look at is \cite{citation2}.

\bibliographystylePS{plain}
\bibliographyPS{\bibfile}

\bibliographystyle{plain}
\bibliography{\bibfile}

\end{document}

Then if the file containing this is called example.tex, you compile like this:

latex example
bibtex example
bibtex PS
latex example
latex example

See also e.g. these posts.