LaTeX is a freely available typesetting system that allows you to produce professional looking publications. Many people find that LaTeX is particularly useful for working with long documents or for documents that contain mathematical formulae or equations. It is a popular system for those preparing scientific and technical documents. You can create documents with LaTeX using any one of large number of different LaTeX editors, or even by just using a plain text editor like Windows Notepad.
When preparing a LaTeX document, special commands are incorporated into the text to produce effects such as heading styles, bold or italic emphasis, mathematical symbols and so on. These effects only become visable after the LaTeX document has been compiled.
BibTeX is a program that works with LaTeX to allow you to include in-text citations and a bibliography in your document. Many reference managers offer some level of support for working with LaTeX and BibTeX.
You can find out more about LaTeX and BibTeX by following the links on the left of the screen. On the right of the screen you will find a link to download a guide to using reference management packages with LaTeX and BibTeX.
These links will provide you with more information about LaTeX and BibTeX.
We have prepared a guide to using LaTeX and BibTex with different reference management packages (Endnote, RefWorks, Zotero and JabRef) which you can download from the link below.
JabRef is an application which you can use to manage and generate BibTeX files. You can download a quick start guide to JabRef below.
The University of Oxford's IT Learning Centre offer several LaTeX courses. You can view the course listing on the IT services website: