bibliographystyleplain

Bibliographystyleplain refers to the BibTeX style file plain.bst, used to determine how bibliographic entries are formatted in LaTeX documents. It is one of the classic BibTeX styles and is designed to provide a simple, consistent, and compact bibliography without extra bells and whistles.

Under plain, common entry types such as article, book, incollection, and proceedings are formatted with author names, title, venue (journal or booktitle), year, volume, number, and pages in a straightforward, readable layout. Citations in the text are numeric, and the bibliography is sorted by author alphabetically, with year and title serving as tie-breakers.

Plain is intended for quick, readable references and general-purpose use. It does not by itself enforce modern features such as explicit URLs or DOIs in every entry, and it offers limited localization and customization compared with newer systems.

Usage in a LaTeX document is straightforward: place \bibliographystyle{plain} and \bibliography{filename} in the document, then run LaTeX, BibTeX, and LaTeX twice more to produce the final document. Plain is included in most TeX distributions (TeX Live, MiKTeX) by default.

Compared with alternatives like unsrt (which preserves citation order), alpha or abbrv (alphabetical labels), plain remains a common choice for simple, legacy, or minimal-document workflows. For advanced formatting and localization, users often migrate to biblatex with biber.