LaTeX stopped building a BibTeX bibliography, how to troubleshoot it?
Summarised (and expanded) from comments above:
BibTeX uses the aux file written by LaTeX (showing where you want to cite what) together with a bst file (containing stylistic information - such as plain.bst) and a bib file (containing bibliographic information about any document you might want to reference). So a workflow from the command line might look like
latex
- to generate the aux filebibtex
- to generate a bbl file which contains information about the specific references mentioned in the aux file, formatted correctlylatex
- to incorporate the information in the bbl file into your typeset document- possibly
latex
again, to fix any cross-referencing problems introduced when all the citations were included
Looking at the aux and bbl files along the way - and, as @Joseph pointed out, the blg file which is BibTeX's log - can help to troubleshoot problems.
For completeness as an answer: on this occasion it apparently turned out that the bibtex
step wasn't working due to a typo in the name of the bst file.