Custom Bibliography In Latex

I was required to use a specific citation style that was specified by the professor for a report. It was a specific version of IEEE. Although Latex supports IEEE format, the format did not match the specification of the professor.

Therefore, I was looking for a way to customize the way the references look in the reference list. I presumed this would be rather simple, boy was I wrong.

If you don't want to read the story part of this blog and you just want the answer, skip to Custom references in Latex

Customizing References In Tex

After a lot of online research, a lot of which is really old posts, I found that you had to customize a .bst file which latex uses to format the references.

For some stupid reason, the configuration is insanely complicated. It uses a bunch of macros and crazy instructions. It was recommended that I find one that is closest to my desired reference style, and modify that.

Since I was using IEEE, I found this IEEE reference .bst file online: IEEEtran.

However, once I tried to include it in my code, I realized that .bst files are ACTUALLY for an older version of citation, bibtex, and I'm using biblatex. Therefore this method did not work for me.

Customizing References In Latex

After looking around for a little longer, at which point I found out that to customize the reference list using biblatex, you are required to edit two separate files: bbx and 'cbx'. The recommendation here is also to just download an existing style that gets as close to your required style and edit it. Here's a list of styles: BibLatex Styles. If you're trying to get the same IEEE files I require, here is a direct link to it: IEEE Style - download and unzip biblatex-ieee.tds.zip.

Once you download the required files, rename them to something else so that you can test if they are being included in your latex code.

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage[style=CustomIEEE]{biblatex}

\begin{document}
\end{document}

Here I have files called CustomIEEE.bbx and CustomIEEE.cbx in the same directory.

To test if this works, change something obvious about the .bbx file (I found this to be the primary file) so that you can compile and check if the file is being included in the compilation.

In that file, I updated the following files to test it:

\DeclareBibliographyDriver{online}{%
  \usebibmacro{bibindex}%
  \usebibmacro{begentry}%
  \usebibmacro{author/editor+others/translator+others}%
  \setunit{\adddot\addspace}%

  %% Commented this line to check if now title is no longer included.
  %% \usebibmacro{title}%

  \setunit{\adddot\addspace}%
  %% ...

After this update, I no longer saw the title included in the references list which indicated to me that my custom configuration was actually the configuration being used.

Note: This is the command that I used to compile by pdf. I'm on an ArchLinux machine and this may differ for you if you use a different operating system. biber is the program used to compile the references. Here, my tex file is called report.tex.

pdflatex report && \
    biber report && \
    pdflatex report && \
    pdflatex report

Adding Custom Fields

To add custom fields to your .bib files (such as "accessed"), you have to create a .dbx file. This file should contains all the "fields" that are to be specific in your .bib file.

Contents of the .dbx file:

\DeclareDatamodelFields[type=field, datatype=literal]{accessed}

Include this data model into the tex file:

\documentclass{article}

% Specify the datamodel attribute
\usepackage[style=CustomIEEE, datamodel=accessed]{biblatex}

\addbibresource{references.bib}

% This specifies the style that the attribute is printed in.
\DeclareFieldFormat{accessed}{[Accessed: #1]}

...

Here is the update I made to the .bbx file to reflect this new field:

\newbibmacro*{accessed}{%
  \iffieldundef{accessed}
    {}
    {%
      \printtext{\printfield{accessed}}%
    }%
}

\DeclareBibliographyDriver{online}{%
  %% ...
  \usebibmacro{accessed}%
  %% ...