I’m currently writing my PhD dissertation using the uclathe style. Below are notes and tips on my writing process using LaTex:

  • For references, the template includes a uclathe bibliographystyle. However, that style follows BibTex’s default alpha style, which uses author abbreviations and years rather than numbers to denote each citation. I personally like to enumerate my references, so I opted to use the ieeetr style, which enumerates and sorts the references automatically
  • If you are using TexStudio as your editor, it is recommended that you use the following Build & View (Preferences -> Build -> Build & View) order of commands: PdfLaTex - BibTex - PdfLaTex - PdfLaTex. I think this has to do with how the bibliography is processed with LaTex
  • For some reason sometimes .bbl does not update from .bib when compiling. In that case, delete the .bbl file and re-compile
  • If you try to compile a document containing a bibliography without actually citing anything, there will be a “something’s wrong–perhaps a missing \item \end{thebibliography}” error. In this case, actually cite something, delete .bbl file then recompile. UPDATE [4/4/2020]: Per Junhyung’s suggestion, “you can actually include the command \nocite{*} in the file and it will print everything in your .bib file in the bibliography and not give you the error you mention here.”