Mrthfx

I found a lot of posts about the same problem but none could help. Can you please help me figure out why I am getting this error? I am using: IEEEtran.bst and IEEEtran.cls. Both of those files and the main .tex file and the references.bib are in one folder. When I try to compile my script, I get this error:

test.bbl(24): Error: LaTeX Error: Something's wrong--perhaps a missing item.

Here is test.bbl:

% Generated by IEEEtran.bst, version: 1.12 (2007/01/11)

begin{thebibliography}{}

providecommand{url}[1]{#1}

csname url@samestyleendcsname

providecommand{newblock}{relax}

providecommand{bibinfo}[2]{#2}

providecommand{BIBentrySTDinterwordspacing}{spaceskip=0ptrelax}

providecommand{BIBentryALTinterwordstretchfactor}{4}

providecommand{BIBentryALTinterwordspacing}{spaceskip=fontdimen2font plus

BIBentryALTinterwordstretchfactorfontdimen3font minus

  fontdimen4fontrelax}

providecommand{BIBforeignlanguage}[2]{{%

expandafterifxcsname l@#1endcsnamerelax

typeout{** WARNING: IEEEtran.bst: No hyphenation pattern has been}%

typeout{** loaded for the language `#1'. Using the pattern for}%

typeout{** the default language instead.}%

else

language=csname l@#1endcsname

fi

#2}}

providecommand{BIBdecl}{relax}

BIBdecl



end{thebibliography}

And my test.tex:

documentclass[conference]{IEEEtran}

begin{document}



section{Test Citation}

cite{logjam2015}



% ---- Bibliography ----

bibliographystyle{IEEEtran}

bibliography{references}



end{document}

And the references.bib

@inproceedings{logjam2015,

 author               = {Adrian, David and Bhargavan, Karthikeyan and Durumeric, Zakir and Gaudry, Pierrick and Green, Matthew and Halderman, J. Alex and Heninger, Nadia and Springall, Drew and Thom{'e}, Emmanuel and Valenta, Luke and VanderSloot, Benjamin and Wustrow, Eric and Zanella-B{'e}guelin, Santiago and Zimmermann, Paul},

 booktitle            = {Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS '15)},

 pages                = {5-17},

 title                = {{I}mperfect {F}orward {S}ecrecy: {H}ow {D}iffie-{H}ellman {F}ails in {P}ractice},

 url                  = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2810103.2813707},

 year                 = {2015},

 }

You have generated the .bbl file at a time when your document contained no cite or nocite command. The error derives from a bad redefinition made by IEEEtran.cls of the endthebibliography macro.

The standard classes have something like

newenvironment{thebibliography}[1]

     {[irrelevant code omitted]}

     {def@noitemerr

       {@latex@warning{Empty `thebibliography' environment}}%

      endlist}

which implies

defendthebibliography{%

  def@noitemerr{@latex@warning{Empty `thebibliography' environment}}%

  endlist

}

but IEEEtran.cls has

letendthebibliographyendlist

which is plainly wrong.

If you fix it

documentclass[conference]{IEEEtran}



makeatletter

defendthebibliography{%

  def@noitemerr{@latex@warning{Empty `thebibliography' environment}}%

  endlist

}

makeatother



begin{document}



section{Test Citation}

cite{logjam2015}



% ---- Bibliography ----

bibliographystyle{IEEEtran}

bibliography{references}



end{document}

then also an empty .bbl file (that is, with no bibitem command) will just produce a warning and not an error.

In my case, this was in the context of a BibTex BBL file, which, upon inspection was empty.

Apparently, Overleaf reported the .bib file's name as Mendeley.bib and I included bibliography{Mendeley}, but the file was silently not found.

Solution: I renamed the .bib file to all lower case and updated the bibliography entry to match and everything worked as expected.

I had exactly the same error message, with an empty .bbl file. If you are using MiKTeX like me, you can try to change bibliographystyle{IEEEtran} with bibliographystyle{ieeetran} with all lower case. Then run BibTeX. Finally generate your document running what you are used to. It solved my problem.

I found this solution reading https://ctan.org/pkg/ieeetran, where they provide the latest version of the IEEEtran BibTeX style (which I didn't need to download by the way), and specified that it is contained in TeX Live as IEEE­tran and in MiKTeX as ieee­tran.

For me, there was no content in the latex files so by just including a temporary citation in the paper solved the problem.