Proper footnote citations with LaTeX

To get full foot­note cita­tions, you need to use the BibLa­TeX pack­age. This is kind of new pack­age, at least rel­a­tively speak­ing. BibLa­TeX reworks the way you work with your bib­li­og­ra­phy. You still cre­ate your basic bib­li­og­ra­phy data­base in a .bib file, but you no longer use Bib­TeX to work with that file in your paper.

What does this mean in prac­tice? I guess the best way to see this is to see two sam­ple files with a lit­tle bit of commentary.

A stan­dard paper using Bib­TeX and natbib

A straight­for­ward paper using Bib­TeX and nat­bib will include (1) a call to use the nat­bib pack­age, (2) a com­mand to set the cita­tion style, (3) some cita­tion com­mands in the text, (4) a dec­la­ra­tion of the bib­li­og­ra­phy style, and (5) then a call to print the bib­li­og­ra­phy which spec­i­fies your .bib file. Here is a snip­pet of a doc­u­ment that does all these things: 
\usepackage{natbib} %(1)
\setcitestyle{authoryear,aysep={}} %(2)

\begin{document}

% Some text with a footnote citation:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet,\footnote{\citet{ZimmermanCEO}} %(3)

% The rest of the paper...

\bibliographystyle{Phil_Review} %(4)
\bibliography{mybib} %(5)
\end{document}
The out­put of this is just what you would expect, the Lorem sen­tence with a foot­note with the con­tents Zim­mer­man (1996), and then a bib­li­og­ra­phy in the Phil_Review style. But this is just an inline cita­tion stuck in a foot­note. It isn’t quite what you were look­ing for in a foot­note citation.

The BibLa­TeX version

BibLa­TeX does not use nat­bib. It has its own com­mands (for­tu­nately, there is an option to make BibLa­TeX com­pat­i­ble with the nat­bib com­mands in case you want to start using BibLa­TeX with a work-in-progress). Our objec­tive is to write foot­note cita­tions, so that is the only com­mand I am going to talk about. To use BibLa­TeX, you do not need the bits I num­bered (1)—(5) above. Here is what you do need:
  1. A call to use the BibLa­TeX package.
  2. A spec­i­fi­ca­tion of the BibLa­TeX options you want.
  3. A spec­i­fi­ca­tion of which bib­li­og­ra­phy to use.
  4. Some cita­tion com­mands (specif­i­cally, for our pur­poses, instances of the \footcite{} command).
  5. A call to print the bib­li­og­ra­phy (with the option to deter­mine what that is called).
Here is the same paper above, but using the BibLa­TeX com­mands instead of the nat­bib ones. (This is the code used in this doc­u­ment as well.) 
\usepackage[style=authortitle-icomp,natbib=true,sortcites=true,
block=space]{biblatex} %(1) and (2)
\bibliography{mybib} %(3)

\begin{document}
% Some text with a footnote citation:

Lorem\footcite{ZimmermanCEO} ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.
 Quisque est elit, varius sed adipiscing quis,
 consequat sed nibh.\footcite{ZimmermanCEO} %(4)

% The rest of the paper...
\printbibliography[title=Works Cited] %(5)
\end{document}
This will give you a doc­u­ment like the main doc­u­ment above. It gives you exactly what you would want in a foot­note cita­tion. Now for a brief word about the options I spec­i­fied when I called the BibLa­TeX package:
  • style=authortitle-icomp This deter­mines the style of both the cita­tion and the bib­li­og­ra­phy. There are a num­ber of other options. The authortitle bit tells BibLa­TeX I want cita­tions by author and title (sur­prise!); the icomp bit tells it to do two things: (1) print the author only once if I cite mul­ti­ple papers by one author (e.g., \footcite{LewisOWP,LewisNW}), and (2) to use ibid, etc. when appro­pri­ate. If you want to turn the first off but keep the sec­ond, just use authortitle-ibid. If you want to turn the sec­ond off but keep the first, use authortitle-comp. And if you want to just use the author-title, use authortitle. There are lots of options for your cita­tion style with BibLa­TeX. See pp. 54—58 of the BibLa­TeX doc­u­men­ta­tion for a com­plete reference.
  • natbib=true This tells BibLa­TeX that it needs to be will­ing to read my nat­bib com­mands. With­out this, BibLa­TeX won’t know what to do with, e.g., my \citet{} commands.
  • sortcites=true If you cite two papers by an author in one com­mand (e.g., \footcite{LewisOWP,LewisNW}), this option will make sure they appear in the right order. Specif­i­cally, it will order the cita­tion in the way they are ordered in the bib­li­og­ra­phy. In the author­ti­tle style, this is alpha­bet­i­cal and then by year. So I can cite things out of order and BibLa­TeX will clean up after me.
  • block=space This sets the spac­ing between the entries in the bib­li­og­ra­phy. The space option dupli­cates the stan­dard bib­li­og­ra­phy in a Bib­TeX bib­li­og­ra­phy, so that is what I use. There are other options. See page 43 of the BibLa­TeX doc­u­men­ta­tion for the others.
If you want to fol­low up on any of these or read more about BibLa­TeX, the doc­u­men­ta­tion is good, even if it is a bit over­whelm­ing. Check it out at http://​www​.ctan​.org/​t​e​x​-​a​r​c​h​i​v​e​/​m​a​c​r​o​s​/​l​a​t​e​x​/​e​x​p​t​l​/​b​i​b​l​a​t​e​x​/​d​o​c​/​b​i​b​l​a​t​e​x​.​pdf. I’ve put a pdf of the above exam­ple in action, (along with these instruc­tions). Let me know if you have any ques­tions about, or prob­lems with, them.
Posted Thursday, June 3rd, 2010 under LaTeX.

12 comments

  1. R M says:
    23 June 2010 at 2:09 am

    what high­light­ing colour scheme are you using in vim? it looks nice.

  2. Charlie Tanksley says:
    23 June 2010 at 7:52 am

    Hi RM, Thanks. Do you mean the code snip­pet in this post? That is actu­ally done using a Word­Press plu­gin called Syn­tax High­lighter Pro (which is a mod­i­fi­ca­tion of the Syn­tax­High­lighter plu­gin) and a LaTeX syn­tax col­or­ing rule (called a ‘brush’ with this plu­gin) by Jorge Mar­tinez de Salinas.

  3. Shane Steinert-Threlkeld says:
    29 July 2010 at 9:43 am

    I’ve installed bibla­tex as per the instruc­tions on CTAN. Every­thing seems to be work­ing OK except that I con­tin­u­ally get “Empty bib­li­og­ra­phy” errors (though using the same \bib­li­og­ra­phy with stan­dard Bib­TeX works fine).

    I think it might have some­thing to do with how vim-LaTeX is run­ning its mul­ti­ple com­pi­la­tions. In my .vimrc I have both

    let g:Tex_DefaultTargetFormat=‘pdf’

    and

    let g:Tex_MultipleCompileFormats=‘dvi,pdf,ps’

    So it is doing mul­ti­ple com­piles, but most likely incorrectly.

    Do you have any tips on how to get the com­pil­ing to work prop­erly with biblatex?

  4. Shane Steinert-Threlkeld says:
    29 July 2010 at 11:37 am

    Regard­ing my pre­vi­ous comment:

    I installed the “bibla­tex” pack­age from Ubuntu’s uni­verse repos­i­tory, and every­thing now almost works.

    The only thing that does not work is \printbibliography[title=Works Cited].

    I can run \print­bib­li­og­ra­phy fine, but get many hic­coughs about key­value pairs when I try and add any of them. Not sure why this is hap­pen­ing, but will investigate.

  5. Shane Steinert-Threlkeld says:
    29 July 2010 at 11:49 am

    I apol­o­gize for the many com­ments (feel free to mod­er­ate how­ever you see fit), but seem to have found an error in your post.

    At least in the 0.8 ver­sion of bibla­tex, title is no longer a valid key for \printbibliography

    To get the desired result, I had to do:

    \defbibheading{wc}{\section*{Works Cited}} \printbibliography[heading=wc]

    • Charlie Tanksley says:
      29 July 2010 at 1:38 pm

      Thanks for the update, Shane. I had been work­ing off an older ver­sion of BibLa­TeX (obvi­ously :) ), and I’m glad to hear about the change. Oddly, the doc­u­men­ta­tion for ver­sion 0.9 still includes the ‘title’ bit, but it is clear that you can do this the way you said, and it sounds like that is the way that works now.

      Any clue what caused the first prob­lem you had (the ‘Empty bib­li­og­ra­phy’ errors)? Is that fixed now?

  6. Shane Steinert-Threlkeld says:
    30 July 2010 at 7:47 pm

    Yes, that error went away as well. It wasn’t an issue with mul­ti­ple com­piles, though I’m not sure exactly what the cause was.

    (I believe it has to do with the down­loaded bibla­tex vs. the pack­age from Ubuntu’s repos­i­to­ries. I’m not too sure why this would be the case because I fol­lowed their instal­la­tion instruc­tions explicitly.)

  7. Stephen P. Cohen says:
    1 September 2011 at 5:55 am

    Hi Char­lie,

    This site is a great resource. I won­der if you could assist me with a bibla­tex prob­lem. Have you ever seen the fol­low­ing problem/error?

    At the end of my paper the Ref­er­ences out­put looks fine until I exam­ine it closely. Then I see that only the first author of multi-author works are set cor­rectly. Example:

    Kumar, P.J. and M.L. Clark

    instead of

    Kumar, P.J. and Clark, M.L.

    What puz­zles me is that the .bib file is correct

    @book{kumar-09, Address = {Lon­don}, Author = {Kumar, P.J. and Clark, M.L.},

    So I don’t know where to start look­ing for the problem.

    Any ideas would help.

    Work flow: OS: Mac OS X Snow Leopard

    Markup: Emacs org-mode, export (C-c C-e l) to LaTeX

    TeX pro­gram: texlive 2011

    GUI: TeXShop

    options: \usepackage[style=authoryear,natbib]{biblatex}

    Many thanks.

  8. Stephen P. Cohen says:
    1 September 2011 at 12:38 pm

    Hi Char­lie,

    I found the answer! (on tex​.stack​ex​change​.com) Some­one had a sim­i­lar prob­lem back in April. The answer was to include the fol­low­ing in the preamble:

    \DeclareNameAlias{last-first/first-last}{last-first}

    Sim­ple. (except it would have taken me for­ever to find the answer).

    Regards.

  9. Gilberto Conde says:
    15 February 2012 at 7:50 pm

    thanks a lot. do you know of a sim­ple way of turn­ing nat­bib cita­tions into footcite ones? I need to change all my nice author/year nat­bib cita­tions into foot­note cita­tions (using ibid and so on) in a book, fast.

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