Gdtyjr

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)
beginthebibliography
providecommandurl[1]#1
csname url@samestyleendcsname
providecommandnewblockrelax
providecommandbibinfo[2]#2
providecommandBIBentrySTDinterwordspacingspaceskip=0ptrelax
providecommandBIBentryALTinterwordstretchfactor4
providecommandBIBentryALTinterwordspacingspaceskip=fontdimen2font plus
BIBentryALTinterwordstretchfactorfontdimen3font minus
 fontdimen4fontrelax
providecommandBIBforeignlanguage[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
providecommandBIBdeclrelax
BIBdecl

endthebibliography

And my test.tex:

documentclass[conference]IEEEtran
begindocument

sectionTest Citation
citelogjam2015

% ---- Bibliography ----
bibliographystyleIEEEtran
bibliographyreferences

enddocument

And the references.bib

@inproceedingslogjam2015,
 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'eguelin, Santiago and Zimmermann, Paul,
 booktitle = Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS '15),
 pages = 5-17,
 title = Imperfect Forward Secrecy: How Diffie-Hellman Fails in Practice,
 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

newenvironmentthebibliography[1]
 [irrelevant code omitted]
 def@noitemerr
 @latex@warningEmpty `thebibliography' environment%
 endlist

which implies

defendthebibliography%
 def@noitemerr@latex@warningEmpty `thebibliography' environment%
 endlist

but IEEEtran.cls has

letendthebibliographyendlist

which is plainly wrong.

If you fix it

documentclass[conference]IEEEtran

makeatletter
defendthebibliography%
 def@noitemerr@latex@warningEmpty `thebibliography' environment%
 endlist

makeatother

begindocument

sectionTest Citation
citelogjam2015

% ---- Bibliography ----
bibliographystyleIEEEtran
bibliographyreferences

enddocument

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 bibliographyMendeley, 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 bibliographystyleIEEEtran with bibliographystyleieeetran 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.