A few months back, I posted about my decision to use LaTeX for writing my thesis, in preference to Word or something of that ilk. I seem to get a few Google hits from other people interested in using LaTeX in the humanities, so I will occasionally post useful things I've gleaned, even though it will be of no interest to most readers …

So here's one. In theses (and monographs), historians generally separate their bibliographies into different sections for the different types of sources — for example, "Primary sources" and "Secondary sources". It wasn't obvious to me how to do this in standard LaTeX/BibTeX, which just puts all of your references into a single bibliography.1 So, last night while procrastinating, I went looking for the answer and found it. There are several options listed there, but the only one I tried was the multibib package, and it works just fine for me.

It works like this: in the preamble, after calling the package,2 specify the name of each bibliography you need, along with a unique (and preferably, short) identifying key. For example, to make separate bibliographies for primary and for secondary sources, you might do the following:

\usepackage{multibib}
\newcites{pri}{Primary sources}
\newcites{sec}{Secondary sources}

The \newcites command takes the existing citation commands (eg \cite) and redefines them so that there is an equivalent for each of your bibliographies (in this case, \citepri and \citesec). You then use these instead of the standard citation commands:

This is a sentence about a primary source.\footcitepri{aston:1914} And this one refers to some specific pages in a secondary source.\footcitesec[1-5]{bialer:1980}

\newcites does the same thing for the bibliography commands, so at the end of the document (or wherever you want to place them) you would have something like this:

\bibliographystylepri{jox.bst}
\bibliographypri{all.bib}
\bibliographystylesec{jox.bst}
\bibliographysec{all.bib}

Then you run bibtex, as you would normally do, but now you have to run it once for each bibliography, eg:

% bibtex pri
% bibtex sec

Then latex it up again a couple of times to get the references right (again, as you normally would) and voila:

multibib

multibib
Shiny.

With a standard bibliography TeXShop can bibtex it for you, but it appears not to know about multibib, so you have to do it from the command line (not a big deal for me as I always have several Terminal windows open anyway). Apparently iTeXmac does do multibib, and a lot more besides, but for the moment I am happy with TeXShop so I haven't tried this yet.

More information about multibib can be found here.

  1. For that matter, I'm not sure how to do it in Word/Endnote either; I usually ended up cutting and pasting by hand. I'm sure there must be a better way!
  2. Note that if you also use the jurabib package (and if you are writing in the humanities, you almost certainly are, or should be), you need to call that first, before multibib.

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