Unnumbered thebibliography in LaTeX?

August 5, 2009 2:40 PM

In LaTeX, how do I get \thebibliography{} to not number items? I just want them listed plainly, with a hanging indent if they spill over a single line. I don't want to use BibTeX.

It's an old paper written by someone else that I'm typesetting in LaTeX, so I want to preserve some of the idiosyncrasies in the citation rather than have BibTeX do it "properly". That's why I'm using thebibliography instead.

posted by limon to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

According to one page, you can use the command:

\bibitem[label]{cite_key}

in the \thebibliography{} environment. If you omit the [label] option, it numbers them. Therefore, try filling it with something else or leaving it empty:

\bibitem[]{cite_key}
\bibitem[{ }]{cite_key}

for example.
posted by fatllama at 3:12 PM on August 5, 2009

I suspect \bibitem[{ }]{...} will give you a [] or period before each entry. If \bibitem[]{} doesn't work, I'm sure you can fix this by copying and altering the \newenvironment{thebibliography} command from your article.cls file, obviously make it \renewcommand. Btw, you'll see we're just dealing with an ordinary list environment here, and \bibitem is just a wrapper for \item. Btw, I've generate the first version with bibtex pulling from some online bibtex database, like mathscinet, and then edit it manually.
posted by jeffburdges at 3:46 PM on August 5, 2009

Use Bibtex with the Chicago Manual, APA, or MLA style (all available here), then edit the .bbl file by hand to adjust the order/italicization/etc of the data.

Yay Ben Salzberg!
posted by gleuschk at 6:02 PM on August 5, 2009 [1 favorite]

Does \thebibliography*{} work?

I can't test it as I'm using a machine without a working LaTeX install, but given the effect of adding an asterisk to other commands, it might.
posted by James Scott-Brown at 2:04 PM on August 6, 2009

You don't even need to manually edit this aspect of the .bbl file, just use " \let\oldbibitem=\bibitem \def\bibitex#1{\oldbibitem[]{#1}} ", assuming that works. Otherwise you'll need to alter the enviroment as I suggested above.
posted by jeffburdges at 6:16 AM on August 7, 2009