How do I set up my LaTeX document to enable me to cite from my BibTeX bibliography?

Question

This may be an overly simplistic question but please bear with me...

I have a BibTeX bibliography containing all of my references, set up using BibDesk. I am now trying to cite these references in my LaTeX documents. Following the advice on the LaTeX wikibooks page, I have included the following lines into my LaTeX document...

\bibliographystyle{plain}
\bibliography{/Users/Graeme/Documents/References/BIBliography.bib}

... where BIBliography is my .bib file, created in BibDesk.

Unfortunately, when I cite something in the document, using \cite{citekey} and typeset the document, the log tells me that there were undefined references. In the .pdf that is produced, there is a [?] where the references should be.

Am I doing something wrong? Do I need to store my .bib for in a particular location? I know there can be some errors that mean you need to typeset the document several times, but I have tried countless times to no avail.

I would be very grateful if someone could help out.

Answer 1

Make sure that after every change in your BibTeX file you do this:

1. Run LaTeX
2. Run BibTeX
3. Run LaTeX
4. Run LaTeX

Answer 2

You can do such things in a simplified way using the automation tool arara by @Paulo Cereda. First you have to install arara after downloading it from Paulo Cereda's git hub space. Then in your document just before the \documentclass{article} add the following lines:

% arara: pdflatex 
% arara: bibtex 
% arara: pdflatex 
% arara: pdflatex 
\documentclass{article}
.
.
.

Let us say that you have saved your document with the name mydoc.tex. From command prompt, issue a command

arara full path to your document\mydoc.tex

Arara will take care of running pdflatex, then bibtex, pdflatex and again pdflatex by a single command.

For more details, refer to the arara user manual. If you are using a specific editor, you may seek help from this site for adding a tool bar button to your editor using which you can run arara.