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National College of Ireland

NCI LIBRARY

Referencing and Avoiding Plagiarism: LaTeX and BibTeX

Introduction

LaTeX is a document preparation system that uses plain text and markup languages to set the structure of your document. You can also stylise your document, add citations and create a bibliography using LaTeX
BibTeX is a file format (.bib) that can be used to process your citations and bibliographies in your LaTeX document.

Installing LaTeX

To install LaTeX on MacOS or Linux, follow the instructions provided on this link:

https://www.latex-project.org/get/

For Windows users, use the following manual to install WinEdt (text editor) as well as TEX for LaTeX. See section 1 of the manual for step-by-step instructions.

http://www.winedt.com/doc/QuickGuide.pdf

Note: To register your WinEdt you will need to get a Name and a Code from your lecturer or the School of Computing. Once you have this information in your WinEdt window select Help Menu > Register WinEdt and replace the Name and Code box details with the information you have received from your lecturer or the School of Computing.

Take a look at these resources for more information about how to use LaTeX:

https://www.latex-tutorial.com/tutorials/

https://tobi.oetiker.ch/lshort/lshort.pdf

BibTeX

Once you have created a .bib file and have linked it to your LaTeX document, you can create entries in the file to set your references. Then you can tag your entries to the content in your LaTeX document in order to add a reference. You can also apply different styles to you citations and reference in your LaTeX document by adding different packages and setting your bibliography style.

For more information, go to the BibTeX website where you can learn more about the BibTeX File Format and How to use BibTeX.

For a step by step example of how to set up a .bib file in your LaTeX document watch this quick YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KS9GvK7cvmo

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