Mrthfx

I am writing my thesis and I would like the Bibliography to be single spaced.

I've read about using the singlespace command, but I think this requires using the setspace package which I don't want to do, because this makes all my figure captions single spaced (which I don't want).

I am using renewcommand{baselinestretch}{2.1} in my preamble to set the spacing for the document.

I am just using the default bibliography settings. So I'm just using:

bibliographystyle{unsrt}



bibliography{refs}

to make my bibliography. Is there a command I can put here to make it single spaced?

Alternatively, if anyone can tell me how to retain double spaced figure captions with setspace that would also work!

Thank you!

As a side note, I would use

linespread{2.1}selectfont

instead of

renewcommand{baselinestretch}{2.1}

in the preamble.

To answer your question, load the package etoolbox and insert the following line in your preamble

AtBeginEnvironment{thebibliography}{linespread{1}selectfont}

This will change the line spread to 1 as soon as the bibliography starts.

MWE

begin{filecontents*}{refs.bib}

@article{someguykey2010,

author="SomeGuy",

title="A journal article",

year=2010,

journal="A Journal",

}

@article{someotherguykey2013,

author="SomeOtherGuy",

title="A journal article",

year=2013,

journal="A Journal",

}

end{filecontents*}



documentclass{article}



usepackage{etoolbox}

AtBeginEnvironment{thebibliography}{linespread{1}selectfont}



usepackage{lipsum} %just for dummy text





begin{document}



linespread{2.1}selectfont



lipsum[1]



nocite{*}



bibliographystyle{plainnat}

bibliography{refs}



end{document} 

Output

If you don't want to load etoolbox, simply issue

linespread{1}selectfont

before your bibliography.

At some point I wrote or found (?) the following to make my bibliography more compact as I didn't like the standard spacing:

% stop the bibliography from being too spaced out

defthebibliography#1{%

  section*{References@mkboth{References}{References}}list

  {[arabic{enumi}]}{settowidthlabelwidth{[#1]}leftmarginlabelwidth

  advanceleftmarginlabelsep

  itemsepz@parsepz@topsepz@parskipz@

  usecounter{enumi}}

  defnewblock{hskip .11em plus .33em minus .07em}

  sloppyclubpenalty4000widowpenalty4000

  sfcode`.=1000relax}

As others have said you probably also want to add something like renewcommand{baselinestretch}{1} to this in order to make the line spacing reasonable. (I agree with David's comment that double spacing is a "typographic disaster".)

I cannot thank you enough for this. I had tried everything to make my bibliography single-spaced by overriding my university's template. Thank you.