BibTex Troubleshooting

• John Vandivier

I recently had trouble compiling citations into my LaTex document from a BibTex source. This article explains how I overcame the issues.

  1. I use both TeXworks and VS Code with LaTeX workshop. To prevent possible incompatibility, I disabled autobuild in LaTeX workshop.
  2. Reduce my entire .tex file and bibfile to a single paragraph with a single citation.
  3. Ensure only alphanumeric characters in my bibfile.
  4. Follow the usual compilation pattern:
    1. Build TeXworks pdfLaTeX
    2. Build TeXworks BibTex
    3. Build TeXworks pdfLaTex twice more
    4. There is a build logic to the above four-step series, but that isn't super relevant right now.
  5. If I run into issues, delete all my non-essential build files including .aux, .bbl, .log, .spl, .out, and so on. Start the compilation pattern over.
  6. When I get a success, gradually introduce new bibfile citations or characters so that I can identify each problem one at a time.
  7. In many cases I could escape troublesome characters. In other cases I could get around it in other ways. For example, I the below url in one of my citations was giving me trouble:
    1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryancraig/2019/12/06/welcome-to-the-third-age-of-online-education/#7db6794b676c
    2. I was able to overcome the problem by deleting the hashed portion of the url, as below, and the resulting url still correctly pointed to the intended source.
    3. https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryancraig/2019/12/06/welcome-to-the-third-age-of-online-education/

Hope this helps! StackOverflow, Google, and the LaTeX forum are other good resources for troubleshooting questions.