Error: LaTeX Error: Something's wrong--perhaps a missing item

Question

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},
 }

egreg · Answer

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.

jhclark · Answer

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.

Audrey · Answer

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.

sv_jan5 · Answer

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

tngotran · Answer

In case the error keeps presenting even you already added a cite{something} in your paper, then you have to clear the auxiliary files.
In details, delete any files ended with .log .aux .bbl .blg. Then compile the document again and voila.

Error: LaTeX Error: Something's wrong--perhaps a missing item

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