Time for action – citing texts and listing the references

Using LaTeX's standard features, we shall create a small list of references containing a book and an article by Donald E. Knuth, the creator of TeX. In our body text, we will refer to both:

1. Create a new document as follows:

   \documentclass{article}
   \begin{document}
   \section*{Recommended texts}
   To study \TeX\ in depth, see \cite{DK86}. For writing math texts, see \cite{DK89}.
   \begin{thebibliography}{8}
   \bibitem{DK86} D.E. Knuth, \emph{The {\TeX}book}, 1986
   \bibitem{DK89} D.E. Knuth, \emph{Typesetting Concrete Mathematics}, 1989
   \end{thebibliography}
   \end{document}

2. Typeset and view the output:

   

What just happened?

We used an environment called thebibliography to typeset the list of references, which is similar to a description list as we've seen in Chapter 4, Creating Lists. Each item of this list has got a key. For citing in the body text, we referred to that key using the \cite command.

Let's look at these commands in detail.

Using the standard...