biblatex in a nutshell (for beginners)

A minimal document for biblatex would be

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{biblatex}
% \bibliography{<database>} % deprecated
\addbibresource{<database>.<extension>}
\begin{document}
\cite{<some-ref>}
\printbibliography
\end{document}

which requires a <database> file in .bib format. You then run:

  1. LaTeX
  2. Biber
  3. LaTeX

Normally, you'd also select a bibliography style by loading this an an optional argument to the biblatex line

\usepackage[style=numeric-comp]{biblatex}

See How to use biber and Biblatex with Biber: Configuring my editor to avoid undefined citations for more if your editor is not set up to offer Biber 'out of the box'.

For some time, biblatex has supported two 'backends' (the program that extracts references from the .bib file), BibTeX and Biber. As of version 2, Biber is the default backend, so I have used it above. Biber is more powerful and works natively with UTF-8 input, but where it is not available one can fall back on more limited support using BibTeX. The workflow is pretty similar:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[backend=bibtex8]{biblatex}
% \bibliography{<database>} % deprecated
\addbibresource{<database>.<extension>}
\begin{document}
\cite{<some-ref>}
\printbibliography
\end{document}

and you then need to run

  1. LaTeX
  2. BibTeX
  3. LaTeX

As you'll see, this is very little difference from using Biber: basically replace 'Biber' with 'BibTeX'.

You should use the '8-bit' version of BibTeX as a minimum, rather than the ancient 7-bit BibTeX. At the Command line, this is used by doing

bibtex8 --wolfgang <filename>

where <filename> is the name of your LaTeX file.

There is more you can do, but this should get you started.

Recent versions of biblatex have deprecated

\bibliography{<database>} % Must be .bib

in favour of the more general

 \addbibresource{<database>.<extension>}

The latter is more general, but you must include the file extension (usually .bib).


biblatex comes with a variety of built-in bibliography/citation style families (numeric, alphabetic, authoryear, authortitle, verbose), and there's a growing number of custom styles. That said, here's how to approximately emulate the output of the traditional BibTeX styles plain, abbrv, unsrt, and alpha:

plain --> \usepackage[style=numeric]{biblatex}

abbrv --> \usepackage[style=numeric,giveninits=true]{biblatex}

unsrt --> \usepackage[style=numeric,sorting=none]{biblatex}

alpha --> \usepackage[style=alphabetic]{biblatex}

In the first three instances, you may omit style=numeric as this is the default style of biblatex.


Section 1 of the biblatex documentation, which you're referring to, reads:

This document is a systematic reference manual for the biblatex package. Look at the sample documents which ship with biblatex [1] to get a first impression. For a quick start guide, browse §§ 1.1, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 3.1, 3.3, 3.6, 3.7, 3.11.

I just got started with biblatex by reading these sections (and trying out the things described) and I feel like they gave me a thorough overview of the basic functions. Of course, there's a lot among this information that you can just skim or skip, but I think it's good to know what options are out there.

I read into the German article that Herbert referred to as well, but I didn't feel like it really told me what to do and how to get started, but perhaps that's because this is the first time I ever used some kind of bibliography tool in LaTeX.

If you need to decide whether to use BibTeX or Biber as a backend, Alan Munn's extensive (but comprehensible!) answer to bibtex vs. biber and biblatex vs. natbib might be of help to you. I decided to use Biber.

Concludingly, I recommend going straight to the source and getting some first-hand information by reading the mentioned parts of the biblatex documentation.

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