Wrong section counter for references when using titlesec

Question

Changing the style of my sections using the package titlesec works fine with these lines

\usepackage{titlesec}
\titleformat{\section}[block]{\large\scshape\centering{\Roman{section}.}}{}{1em}{}

but after adding my literature to the end of the file...

\bibliographystyle{plain}
\bibliography{literature}

...the counter doesn't increase and the spacing is not entirely correct for the references section. However, the heading has the defined section style. Do you have a solution for having a consistent counter?

Answer 1

It's not convenient to include the counter in the second argument of \titleformat; this will cause starred sections to be numbered in an "unorthodox" way, as the following simple example shows:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{titlesec}
\titleformat{\section}[block]{\large\scshape\centering{\Roman{section}.}}{}{1em}{}

\begin{document}

\section{Test Section}
\subsection{Test Subsection}
\section*{Test Section}
\subsection{Test Subsection}

\end{document}

This produces the following wrong result (the numbering is wrong, the spacing between the number and the title is wrong and the counter for subordinate sectional units isn't reset appropriately):

The right way to proceed here is to redefine \thesection previously to use Roman numerals, as the following example illustrates:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{titlesec}
\usepackage{filecontents}

\begin{filecontents*}{\jobname.bib}
@article{test,
  author= "The Author",
  journal = "The Journal",
  pages= "1-2",
  year="2012"
}
\end{filecontents*}

\renewcommand\thesection{\Roman{section}}

\titleformat{\section}[block]
  {\large\scshape\filcenter}{\thesection.}{1em}{}

\begin{document}

\section{test}
\cite{test}
\bibliographystyle{plain}
\bibliography{\jobname}

\end{document}

If you want to number the bibliography section, you can use the etoolbox package to patch the \thebibliography command to use \section instead of the default \section*:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{titlesec}
\usepackage{etoolbox}
\usepackage{filecontents}

\patchcmd{\thebibliography}{\section*}{\section}{}{}

\begin{filecontents*}{\jobname.bib}
@article{test,
  author= "The Author",
  journal = "The Journal",
  pages= "1-2",
  year="2012"
}
\end{filecontents*}

\renewcommand\thesection{\Roman{section}}

\titleformat{\section}[block]
  {\large\scshape\filcenter}{\thesection.}{1em}{}

\begin{document}

\section{test}
\cite{test}
\bibliographystyle{plain}
\bibliography{\jobname}

\end{document}

Not related to the original problem but \centering doesn't have arguments, so instead of \centering{text} one should use something like {\centering text\par} (the braces are only required if it is necessary to explicitly group to keep the effect local).