This guide provides information about citing sources in LaTeX using a .bib file with BibTeX, BibTeX + natbib, BibTeX + biblatex, or biblatex + biber.
A Bib Your TeX workshop is offered every semester.
Especially if you're using only a .bib database, you don't want those long hours spent creating and managing your citations to disappear. Here's a list of tools you can use to make something this bad less likely to happen.
Yale University now has a subscription to Overleaf, which provides a Google Docs-like experience for people writing in LaTeX. Here's some stuff you need to know:
https://v2.overleaf.com is where you can access the new interface.
These guides are broken into general resources, followed by resources specifically for BibTeX, natbib, and biblatex + biber.
Here are links to some software that will be helpful to you when working in LaTeX. While you can run LaTeX from the command line, many text editors also exist.