MLA-style bibliography with BibLaTeX: How to organise by section?

Question

I'm using the MLA authoring style. I would like to print out a bibliography subdivided into different sections. I also want annotations on each source. Is this possible with BibLaTeX? Should I just do it manually?

Answer 1

Yes, I think you can do that with Biblatex, but I think you should still just do it manually.

Note, though, that you are probably wanting to craft your notes differently for each citation from one paper to the next, which leads to the question: why use Bibtex at all? You can generate a Bibtex file the usual way, until all the references are there, then cut&paste the .bbl file into place in your Latex file, and annotate and reformat away to your heart's content.

So I think that Bibtex makes sense as a standard repository of the basic facts about citations you might make again and again: in particular you can get it error-free; my experience as a scientific editor is that most authors are sure that their bibliographies are error-free, most have between 10% and 60% of entries having errors in them. Latex users tend to be better that Word users in this respect, and I think that it is because of Bibtex.

Caveat: you will need to mess about with the thebibliography environment to do this. But that is another question... Also, if there are errors in your Bibtex file, you will need to correct them in two places.

Why I don't like Biblatex: the Bibtex prepresentation is a standard, and is accepted by all kinds of other document processors. You shouldn't put special Latex formatting into your bibliographic database: that will reduce the utility of that database. For m in particular, I use both Latex and Context: both use Bibtex, but only Latex uses Biblatex.

Answer 2

I managed to write a quite nice MLA-style bibliography with bibtex and the style provided by the Reed College (which is based on Natbib), and BibUnits to subdivide the entries in sections (as discussed here)

(let me know if you have any tips with MLA styles, my paper is not finished yet)

EDIT: my answer was for standard bibtex, not biblatex, sorry

Answer 3

yes, you can do it easily with biblatexwith the headings:

For instance:

\defbibheading{general}{\section*{General Architecture}}
\defbibheading{european}{\section*{European Architecture}}

\printbibliography[heading=general,keyword=general]
\printbibliography[heading=european,keyword=european]

and add the relevant keywords={architecture} keywords={general} in your *.bib files

Here is a biblatex MLA-style, if you need biblatex-mla (and a related question, you may also face this problem)