Can I remove the labels from the bibliography, while keeping them in citations?

Question

I'm writing the bibliography of my report with thebibliography because I don't need a BibTeX database (or I don't have the time for learn how to customize or write a style).

The optional argument [label] specifies how the reference will be cited in my main text. Here's my reference definition:

\bibitem[PNUD1996]{PNUD1996} PNUD. Desarrollo Humano en Chile 1996. Santiago: PNUD, 1996.

If I write: in \cite{PNUD1996}. it produces:

in [PNUD1996].

But the label also appears in the bibliography:

[PNUD1996] PNUD. Desarrollo Humano en Chile 1996. Santiago: PNUD, 1996.

Can I remove the label from the bibliography and keep it in the reference? I mean, to get:

in [PNUD1996].

and

PNUD. Desarrollo Humano en Chile 1996. Santiago: PNUD, 1996.

Answer 1

\makeatletter
\def\@biblabel#1{}
\makeatother

in the preamble will do it.

Answer 2

If you use one of the author-data citation systems, such as Harvard or apalike, then there is no key displayed in the bibliography, and readers look up source in the reflist using the information in the body of the items, just as you want. You can mix and match: you can use one BST file to generate the reflist, and an unrelated set of Latex macros to generate citations in the body of your document.

Your example is a little eccentric: you look up items based on author and date, but the author information and date are not together at the start of the bibitem, but occur widely separated. This makes it somewhat more time-consuming to look up citations; it's not unprecedented: the ISO 690 bibliography style splits the information in this way, and there are journals that use author-date referencing with it. But if you have a choice, I'd avoid doing things this way.