25

I'm using a simple bibliography like this

...
\nocite{*}
\bibliographystyle{acm}
\bibliography{refs}
...

and I would like to either replace the numbers ([1], [2], ...) in front of each reference with some other symbol (e.g. dots) or just remove them altogether.

Any ideas?

Edit: I am using the article class.

3lectrologos
  • 789

2 Answers2

31

To change the label, you can redefine \@biblabel; for example, to use a bullet you can say in the preamble:

\makeatletter
\renewcommand\@biblabel[1]{\textbullet}
\makeatother

to suppress the label, use:

\makeatletter
\renewcommand\@biblabel[1]{}
\makeatother

this, however, will preserve indentation. To remove this indentation you can redefine the thebibliography environment (which is basically a list); this redefinition depends on the document class used (and you didn't mention this in your question).

Here's an example of such a redefinition for the article document class:

\documentclass{article}

\makeatletter
\renewcommand\@biblabel[1]{}
\renewenvironment{thebibliography}[1]
     {\section*{\refname}%
      \@mkboth{\MakeUppercase\refname}{\MakeUppercase\refname}%
      \list{}%
           {\leftmargin0pt
            \@openbib@code
            \usecounter{enumiv}}%
      \sloppy
      \clubpenalty4000
      \@clubpenalty \clubpenalty
      \widowpenalty4000%
      \sfcode`\.\@m}
     {\def\@noitemerr
       {\@latex@warning{Empty `thebibliography' environment}}%
      \endlist}
\makeatother

\begin{document}

\nocite{*}
\bibliographystyle{acm}
\bibliography{biblio}

\end{document}
Gonzalo Medina
  • 505,128
  • Both work like a charm! Thanks a lot! (I was indeed using article.) – 3lectrologos Nov 19 '11 at 03:12
  • I am having the same issue but I am using a book document class. Could you help me by providing a working example of how to remove this indentation in this class? I am LATEX enthusiast but not very good at code writing. Regards Rod – Rodrigo Esteves Jun 12 '12 at 23:11
  • @RodrigoEsteves Welcome to TeX.sx! Your question won't be seen by many people here, so it would be best to repost it as a fresh question. Follow-up questions like this are more than welcome! Please use the "Ask Question" link for your new question; there you can link to this question to provide the background. – Caramdir Jun 12 '12 at 23:13
  • @GonzaloMedina I noticed that the top two code blocks actually don't preserve indentation, I don't know why... – warship Aug 07 '17 at 21:30
1

If you are using \usepackage[numbers]{natbib}, then you can remove the [numbers] part to remove numbering.

bingtanghuluwa
  • 11