I want to use a smaller font size for the bibliography, e.g., \footnotesize. What is the easiest way to achieve this? I currently do \renewenvironment{thebibliography}... and copy the definition from report.cls but with the \footnotesize inserted in. However, that seems to be a bit of a hack, so I'm looking for a cleaner way.
asked Jul 27, 2010 at 9:47
4 Answers
First I have to say that you should avoid fiddling with font sizes in order to squish more text into a document. Conferences and journals often discourage such formatting hacks; some might even reject papers found to be doing this.
Anyway, if you still need to to this for whatever reason, the easiest way I found is to write something like
{\footnotesize
\bibliography{bibfile}}
answered Jul 27, 2010 at 11:00
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2I thought this would also change the font size of the "References" heading, but to my surprise it doesn't. Nice! Commented Jul 28, 2010 at 9:41
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45I wouldn't consider bibliographies typeset in a smaller size as a formatting hack - I've seen it quite often in professionally typeset books.– lockstepCommented Aug 9, 2010 at 22:49
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8@JitseNiesen: Unfortunately it changed size of the heading in my case.– nimcapCommented Dec 21, 2011 at 17:33
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@nimcap, which packages are you using? if you cannot solve your problem, you might try to ask a new question. Commented Dec 22, 2011 at 16:53
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3This does not work with
\fontsize{5cm}{5.5cm}. Only part of the bibliography takes the new size formatting... :/– AtcoldCommented May 27, 2016 at 20:04
Using the biblatex package you could also write
\renewcommand*{\bibfont}{\footnotesize}
(Personally I'd use \small instead of \footnotesize.)
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1
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This will lose the process of lowercasing letters of reference titles...– xuhdevCommented Mar 26, 2016 at 2:36
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11To mirror the exact definition of
biblatex.defI would use\renewcommand*{\bibfont}{\normalfont\footnotesize}.– moeweCommented Jun 15, 2017 at 13:06 -
In Rmarkdown, the following worked for me:
\renewcommand\bibliographytypesize{\small}.– M MCommented Oct 23, 2020 at 11:46
And if you use the natbib package:
\def\bibfont{\footnotesize}
answered Aug 9, 2010 at 23:21
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3If you are having problems with getting itshapes, you can use
\renewcommand{\bibfont}{\normalfont\small}Commented Apr 29, 2012 at 8:24 -
should this be now a
\renewcommand? it did not work for me. Commented Jun 9, 2018 at 14:51
Using beamer+biblatex you could also write
\frame[shrink=50] {\printbibliography}
And using beamer+bibtex you could write accordingly
\frame[shrink=50] {\bibliography{bibfile}}
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\begin{frame}[allowframebreaks, shrink=60] \bibliography{bibfile} \bibliographystyle{style} \end{frame}– pyajCommented Jul 6, 2021 at 14:38 -
Very useful for
beamer, where for me,\footnotesizewasn't doing anything. Also, a thing to note, higher the number given to shrink, higher it shrinks. So, a value of 20 does not mean it shrinks "to" 20% but "by" 20%. Commented Jan 12, 2022 at 5:56
.sty) file.\bibliofontfor this purpose. it's worth checking the document class you are using before redefiningthebibliography, but if a suitable command isn't available, your method is appropriate.biblatex. Plus the question here has more views, votes, and is older.