will produce a representative sample of the citations the style will produce. (Because xampl.bib is so extreme in some of its “examples”, the BibTeX run will also give you an interesting selection of BibTeX’s error messages…)\documentclass{article} \begin{document} \bibliographystyle{my-style} \nocite{*} \bibliography{xampl} \end{document}
This question on the Web: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=whatbst