Replace or remove bibliography numbers

Question

I'm using a simple bibliography like this

...
\nocite{*}
\bibliographystyle{acm}
\bibliography{refs}
...

and I would like to either replace the numbers ([1], [2], ...) in front of each reference with some other symbol (e.g. dots) or just remove them altogether.

Any ideas?

Edit: I am using the article class.

Answer 1

To change the label, you can redefine \@biblabel; for example, to use a bullet you can say in the preamble:

\makeatletter
\renewcommand\@biblabel[1]{\textbullet}
\makeatother

to suppress the label, use:

\makeatletter
\renewcommand\@biblabel[1]{}
\makeatother

this, however, will preserve indentation. To remove this indentation you can redefine the thebibliography environment (which is basically a list); this redefinition depends on the document class used (and you didn't mention this in your question).

Here's an example of such a redefinition for the article document class:

\documentclass{article}

\makeatletter
\renewcommand\@biblabel[1]{}
\renewenvironment{thebibliography}[1]
     {\section*{\refname}%
      \@mkboth{\MakeUppercase\refname}{\MakeUppercase\refname}%
      \list{}%
           {\leftmargin0pt
            \@openbib@code
            \usecounter{enumiv}}%
      \sloppy
      \clubpenalty4000
      \@clubpenalty \clubpenalty
      \widowpenalty4000%
      \sfcode`\.\@m}
     {\def\@noitemerr
       {\@latex@warning{Empty `thebibliography' environment}}%
      \endlist}
\makeatother

\begin{document}

\nocite{*}
\bibliographystyle{acm}
\bibliography{biblio}

\end{document}

Answer 2

If you are using \usepackage[numbers]{natbib}, then you can remove the [numbers] part to remove numbering.