Bibliographies are created with bibtex.
Generally, you will have a central bibliography database,
which will have an entry for every paper you have ever referenced.
In the text of the document, put the command
\cite{CHERI83} to reference the paper ``The Distributed V Kernel
and its Performance for Diskless Workstations'' by D.R. Cheriton.
Then, at the end of the document, but before the
\end{document}, put
\bibliographystyle{alpha}
\bibliography{master} % name of your bibliography database
Then, run your document through LATEX. It will complain
LaTeX Warning: Citation `CHERI83' on page 1 undefined.and
No file paper.bbl
This will put some entries in the .aux file. Now run bibtex paper,
which will create the file paper.bbl, by extracting the proper
references from your bibliographic database. bibtex should not
give any error messages.
Then run LATEX again. Again, the warning
LaTeX Warning: Citation `CHERI83' on page 1 undefined.will appear. Run LATEX yet again, and there should be no warnings.
This process must be repeated every time a new reference is added to your document, so you will probably want to wait until the paper is nearly finished before producing the bibliography.