making citations with LaTeX

if you have just a small number of citations and do not want to use something like bibtex, you can manually create them using the thebibliography blocks. however, this quickly gets out of hand if you have more than a handful of references or documents.

\begin{thebibliography}{9}
\bibitem{fur2020}
International Anthropomorphic Research Project.  Species Popularity.
Fur Science, 2020.
https://furscience.com/research-findings/fursonas/3-1-species-popularity/

\bibitem{arXiv:2107.02438v3}
Trizna, D. Shell Language Processing: Unix command parsing for Machine
Learning. Proceedings of Conference on Applied Machine Learning for
Information Security (CAMLIS), 2021.  arXiv: 2107.02438v3
[cs.LG]. http://arxiv.org/

\end{thebibliography}

notice the 9? that must be the length of the longest citation number, or the indentation will be wrong. for example if you had 5 citations you would put 9, or if you had 12 you would put 99

if you would like your tex file to be self-contained, but still want to use biber/biblatex, you can use the biblatex2bibitem CTAN package to convert them once you are done citing.

sometimes referred to as a database, these files are supported by most of LaTeX's citation processors.

@article{arXiv:2107.02438v3,
Author        = {Dmitrijs Trizna},
Title         = {Shell Language Processing: Unix command parsing
for Machine Learning},
Eprint        = {2107.02438v3},
ArchivePrefix = {arXiv},
PrimaryClass  = {cs.LG},
Abstract      = {In this article, we present a Shell Language
Preprocessing (SLP) library},
Year          = {2021},
Month         = {Jul},
Note          = {Proceedings of Conference on Applied Machine
Learning for Information Security (CAMLIS), 2021},
Url           = {http://arxiv.org/abs/2107.02438v3},
File          = {2107.02438v3.pdf}
}

there are other types instead of article too, such as book, inproceedings, manual, masterthesis, and misc.

there are various applications and tools for generating and managing these. if you cite a lot of arXiv, arxiv2bib is nice.

biblatex supports various styles. here are a few, although there are quite a few more.

biber provides better unicode support than other citation processors.

since biber is a backend, it requires biblatex to work, which is probably provided by a package named similar to (despite the name) texmf-dist-bibtexextra or texlive-bibtexextra in your package manager.

\usepackage[backend=biber, style=nature]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{refs.bib}

will include a bibliography file named refs.bib

then, add

\printbibliography

where you want the references to be

bibtex is old and has horrible unicode support, it should probably not be used if you want anything but latin characters.