Gdtyjr

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 renewcommandbaselinestretch2.1 in my preamble to set the spacing for the document.

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

bibliographystyleunsrt

bibliographyrefs

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

linespread2.1selectfont

instead of

renewcommandbaselinestretch2.1

in the preamble.

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

AtBeginEnvironmentthebibliographylinespread1selectfont

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

MWE

beginfilecontents*refs.bib
@articlesomeguykey2010,
author="SomeGuy",
title="A journal article",
year=2010,
journal="A Journal",

@articlesomeotherguykey2013,
author="SomeOtherGuy",
title="A journal article",
year=2013,
journal="A Journal",

endfilecontents*

documentclassarticle

usepackageetoolbox
AtBeginEnvironmentthebibliographylinespread1selectfont

usepackagelipsum %just for dummy text


begindocument

linespread2.1selectfont

lipsum[1]

nocite*

bibliographystyleplainnat
bibliographyrefs

enddocument 

Output

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

linespread1selectfont

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@mkbothReferencesReferenceslist
 [arabicenumi]settowidthlabelwidth[#1]leftmarginlabelwidth
 advanceleftmarginlabelsep
 itemsepz@parsepz@topsepz@parskipz@
 usecounterenumi
 defnewblockhskip .11em plus .33em minus .07em
 sloppyclubpenalty4000widowpenalty4000
 sfcode`.=1000relax

As others have said you probably also want to add something like renewcommandbaselinestretch1 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.