jabref and TeXnicCenter and BibTeX

BibTeX, I hate you for making me feel stupid. But I love you because you are going to make my life a lot easier. right? Right?! RIGHT??!!

1. JabRef databases are saved in .bib format, which are just .txt files and can be opened with WordPad or vi or whatever. They might have a bunch of extra crap in them like full abstracts, the notes you typed into JabRef, whatever. Export the entries for your paper into a separate .bib file: blah.bib.

2. Using the BibTex keys in JabRef, cite the stuff in your .tex file (in TeXnicCenter on a dumb PC if you are like me)

\citet and \citep are for textual and parenthetical citations
Reference sheet for natbib usage

\citep{Dietrich2003, Gauer2004, Stock2006}

3. You have downloaded all of the necessary style files or whatever, for example from the AGU website, and put the agu08.bst file into your working directory. In your working directory, you also have your .tex file and the blah.bib file. In the .tex file you have referenced the .bst and .bib you are using.

\bibliographystyle{agu08}
\bibliography{blah}

4. Build your document in TeXnicCenter. In the profiles for building files (e.g. for LaTeX -> PDF) there is a box to check for running BibTeX (mine was already checked by default). This first Build creates a .bbl file in your working directory.

5. Cut and paste the contents of the .bbl file into your .tex file AND comment out the two lines above in #3.

6. Build the document again, it will now use the \bibitems in the .tex file and everything will work great and you will feel great too. (You might need to build more than two times for all cross references.)

Have fun.

[9/30/2010 ps. It would be very helpful to know if this explanation is useful to you, or if you need/want more detail, or if it worked for you or not. There seems to be the most demand for this information and I really hate how there is not much info out there. I will monitor comments.]