Problems with the title "References" in \begin{thebibliography} environment

Question

My problem is that I want to delete the title "references" of thebibliography environment. I would like to build a \section{7 REFERENCES} and then use \vspace{-xxcm} to move the \bibitem that I wrote.

I'm using article, and I do not want to use biblatex ou bibtex. Furthermore, I'm not a advanced user so I appreciate simple (if exists of course) ways to solve.

obs: Commands like \renewcommand\refname{Reference} simply didn't work in my case.

Answer 1

You said that using the \renewcommand ... approach did not work for you. However, the command you gave (\renewcommand\refname{Reference}) does not remove the heading but sets the heading to "Reference".

Try \renewcommand{\refname}{}, which overwrites to heading to be blank (the {} part)

Answer 2

The way to do it depends on wether you are using the babel package or not, and on the documentcalss you are using.

If you are using babel use:

\addto{\captionsLANGUAGE>}{\renewcommand{\refname}{{TITLE}}}

If you are not using babel use:

\renewcommand{\refname}{TITLE}

In TITLE goes the title you want, in LANGUAGE goes the language you are using. You have to put this line before the \begin{document} statement.

Depending on the documentclass you are using, it might be necessary to replace\refname with \bibname (for example, article uses \refname while book uses\bibname).

Use one of the following commands in case the previous did not work for you:

If you are using babel:

\addto{\captionsLANGUAGE}{\renewcommand{\bibname}{{TITLE}}}

If you are not using babel:

\renewcommand{\bibname}{TITLE}

Here is an example using the babel package in portuguese language, and article as the documentclass:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[portuguese]{babel}    
\addto{\captionsportuguese}{\renewcommand{\refname}{{7 REFERÊNCIAS}}}

\begin{document}
\section*{7 REFERÊNCIAS}
\begin{thebibliography}{widest entry}
    \bibitem[1]{item1} {Item 1 bib}
\end{thebibliography}
\end{document}

To get what you asked for, you have two options: to remove the section line, or to set blank the bibliography title. In the following code, we do the latter:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[portuguese]{babel}

\addto{\captionsportuguese}{\renewcommand{\refname}{{}}} % Here is the change

\begin{document}
\section*{7 REFERÊNCIAS}
\begin{thebibliography}{widest entry}
    \bibitem[1]{item1} {Item 1 bib}
\end{thebibliography}
\end{document}

Hope this answer your question.