Changing the bibliography heading

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Keywords
LaTeX, BibTeX, tip, computing

LaTeX's article document class is commonly used to write short articles, reports, and so on. Since this class doesn't use chapters, section and section*—the latter producing a section heading with no number—are the coarsest divisions available for splitting up a document. By default, a bibliography created using BibTeX and the \bibliography command will be headed by an unnumbered section* called “References”.

But in very short documents with only one level of headings, I often prefer subsection to section because it takes up less space; and in that case having a bibliography heading that is a section looks pretty silly. To get around this, you can include in your document preamble the line

\renewcommand{\bibsection}{\subsection*{References}}

which will use a subsection for the bibliography heading, as required. The same type of command can of course be used to modify the actual text of the heading, as in

\renewcommand{\bibsection}{\section*{Bibliography}}

which will change the heading to be “Bibliography” instead of “References”.