Doxygen \cite producing empty bibliography

Question

I'm trying to use \cite in Doxygen to produce a bibliography page and also a reference within my text. I have bibtex in my search path and a proper .bib file. I have added the .bib file to CITE_BIB_FILES and am using a proper BibTex label found in the .bib file. Doxygen is creating a bibliography page, but it is empty. It is also creating a citation link in the documentation text, but the link is also empty. Any idea how I can get the citation info displayed?

Do you have the parameter `OUTPUT_DIRECTORY` in your configuration set? — pmr, Aug 27 '12 at 17:58
which OS are you working on.. and for which tool are you using it. — Vimal Venugopalan, Aug 31 '12 at 02:00
I do have OUTPUT_DIRECTORY in my configuration set. I'm working on OS X (Mountain Lion) and I was using the wizard when I previously encountered problems. This time, I edited the configuration file myself in Emacs and ran 'doxygen Doxyfile'. I then compiled the latex source at the command line and the resulting PDF produced the proper citation. I'm guessing my original issue was related to some problem (perhaps user related!) with the wizard. — user1401630, Sep 04 '12 at 20:19
It would be useful if you provide an small example which can be used to reproduce the problem. — ceving, Oct 11 '12 at 12:02
There was a bug in Dxoygen versions < 1.8.3. It seems that the problem has been fixed since. — Raffi, Mar 18 '13 at 12:31

score 9 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 15 '13 at 04:50

I was facing the same problem. There is an perl dependency to generate citation. So you must have both perl and bibtex in the system path.

Ignore the example above, that only applies to Latex, for doxygen use (Note: no braces):

\cite Hale

The .bib file has to be located in doxygen working directory.

Bibliographic References HTML page will be then produced by doxygen with:

[1]J. K. Hale. Theory of functional–differential equations. Springer–Verlag, Berlin–Heidelberg–New York, 1977.

for the following bib entry:

   @BOOK{Hale,
   author = "J. K. Hale",
   title = "Theory of functional--differential equations",
   publisher = "Springer--Verlag, Berlin--Heidelberg--New York",
   year = 1977
   }

this was helpful to me. Was surrounding the keys with {}, now i remember to not use them in doxygen comments. — ofloveandhate, Jun 06 '16 at 16:23

score 4 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 06 '17 at 12:20

In order for \cite to work properly you need:

be sure to put your file.bib in the working directory where you call doxygen Doxyfile
bibtex executable must be in the search path
perl executable must be in the search path
the RefName used in \cite RefName must have a corresponding entry in file.bib

score 2 · Answer 3 · answered Apr 01 '13 at 15:13

Maybe a little late, but I had the same problem. Doxygen generated a bibliography for LaTeX output, but not for HTML output and none of the proposed answers worked for me.

As suggested by @Raffi, this seems to be a bug in Doxygen < 1.8.3. I used Doxygen 1.8.1.1 and it did not work. Then I installed Doxygen 1.8.3.1 without changing anything else and it worked fine.

score 1 · Answer 4 · answered Mar 09 '13 at 12:20

When you set CITE_BIB_FILES in DoxyFile did you include the .bib extension on the filename? Doxygen claims it will automatically add the .bib extension, but if you omit it doxygen seems to gets confused and doesn't generate the citelist.doc file properly.

Include .bib in the filename and it should work fine, at least that is the case for me.

score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Jun 30 '16 at 09:42

In order to create a bibliography you need to instal Perl, and add it to the search path, along with bibtex. In the documentation for CITE_BIB_FILES it says:

"The CITE_BIB_FILES ... To use this feature you need bibtex and perl available in the search path ... "

Doxygen \cite producing empty bibliography

5 Answers5