How can I change the "References" to "Reference" in the thebibliography environment?

My problem is that I have only one reference. So I would like the head of this part to appear "Reference" instead of commonly "References". More generally, could we change the title "References" to an arbitrary name? Thank you very much for your help!

26k 6 6 gold badges 109 109 silver badges 148 148 bronze badges asked May 5, 2011 at 8:22 3,766 6 6 gold badges 28 28 silver badges 34 34 bronze badges Commented May 15, 2014 at 13:04

9 Answers 9

It depends on the documentclass.

\renewcommand\bibname

As chl points out. Others use \refname instead of \bibname .

answered May 5, 2011 at 8:28 63.4k 16 16 gold badges 165 165 silver badges 221 221 bronze badges

(+1) Ah, we posted quite at the same time, but you the first :-) I just suggested in addition to replace \refname by \bibname for a book . Feel free to add it to your answer if you like.

Commented May 5, 2011 at 8:31 To change ShareLatex name use \renewcommand\refname . Commented Oct 27, 2016 at 2:11

You can pretty much tell whether you need refname or bibname by whether the current name is references or bibliography, respectively :-)

Commented Jul 6, 2018 at 11:04

@JoannaBryson That's a good heuristic but sadly isn't always true. (It works for the standard document classes but a case-insensitive grep for refname.*biblio and bibname.*reference in my texmf-dist/tex/latex directory show a handful that don't follow that convention. Mainly dissertation formats, it seems.)

Commented Jul 31, 2018 at 8:27 To my experience, some packages like babel may interfere with this command. Commented Jan 2, 2019 at 20:44

In my case, I added the following option to \printbibliography :

\printbibliography[title=]

For more details, see the BibLaTeX documentation, section 3.7.2 The Bibliography.

answered Jan 18, 2017 at 10:29 pgonzalezalv pgonzalezalv 621 5 5 silver badges 2 2 bronze badges Best and simplest answer ;) Commented Jul 24, 2017 at 11:01

It seems \refname works fine for me while \bibname not.

For TOC, in case you need it, use \contentsname

\documentclass[10pt,a4paper] \renewcommand \renewcommand 19.3k 4 4 gold badges 75 75 silver badges 127 127 bronze badges answered Jun 29, 2014 at 9:40 431 4 4 silver badges 2 2 bronze badges

Welcome to TeX.SE! To make your answer more usable for others, it would very much help if you indicated which document class you use. (Some document classes use the macro \bibname , while others use \refname .)

Commented Jun 29, 2014 at 10:45

You can pretty much tell whether you need refname or bibname by whether the current name is references or bibliography, respectively :-)

Commented Jul 6, 2018 at 11:04

In my case, I needed to add the following lines:

\usepackage[english,portuguese] \addto\captionsportuguese> \addto\captionsportuguese> \renewcommand \renewcommand

I hope this helps to complete this topic.

37.6k 10 10 gold badges 102 102 silver badges 202 202 bronze badges answered May 9, 2015 at 16:20 Lucas_Jardim Lucas_Jardim 131 1 1 silver badge 2 2 bronze badges Welcome. When you type some code you can select it and press ctrl+k to format as code. Commented May 9, 2015 at 16:22 Thank you. This helped me too! In my case I had to replace portuguese with german. :) Commented Oct 14, 2020 at 20:55

Renew the \bibsection -command. For example:

(Credits to http://latex.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4089, where I found the solution which worked for me.)

answered May 20, 2017 at 16:44 Golar Ramblar Golar Ramblar 392 3 3 silver badges 9 9 bronze badges

For cyrillic OT1 I found out this solution. hope it'll help. add this to preamble: \addto\captionsrussian>

answered May 21, 2018 at 22:54 51 1 1 silver badge 2 2 bronze badges

What worked for me is an un-numbered chapter:

\renewcommand>

37.6k 10 10 gold badges 102 102 silver badges 202 202 bronze badges answered Mar 4, 2018 at 16:33 340 2 2 silver badges 16 16 bronze badges

Expanding on Lucas Jardim's solution, the most voted solution doesn't work when using babel package as this package overwrites any \refname or \bibname configurations.

In order to get it working you just have to change it after importing babel package:

\usepackage[$LANGUAGE] \addto\captions$LANGUAGE> % \extras$LANGUAGE \bibname

$LANGUAGE is the language you want to use it for
$NEWREFNAME is the new reference name you want to set

The alternatives ( extras instead of captions and \bibname instead of \refname ) were written in the comment if the code doesn't work.

Example for Polish language:

Where $LANGUAGE = polish and $NEWREFNAME = Źródła :

\usepackage[polish] \addto\captionspolish>