Thursday, February 7, 2013

Custom bibliographies

I've recently encountered in more than one occasion a publisher that will ask for references in a particular format (If there are three or less authors then all should be mentioned in the references but only one +"et al." in the text unless there are two, and if there are more than three then it must be the first three authors then "et al." in the references and only one +"et al." in the text).

This is the "prefered format" (as of now) in ADS, but I haven't found a bibliography style file (.bst) for Bibtex that meets that criteria. If you try to change your favorite .bst file, you'll find that it uses an odd language, and some people online might have some suggestions on how to change it, but I couldn't easily find how to edit it.

Instead I found a mention on an elusive package called makebst. After a couple of broken links I found it (via here).

Download it, unzip it, then run:

latex makebst.tex
It will then ask a great amount of questions for every possible situation. In my humble opinion this should be a file provided by the people in charge of editing the publication. But this information will be useful for those writing their own book (e.g. Thesis) and need their BibTeX output in a certain way.

As for the makebst.zip sadly I can't seem to be able to attach a file to this post, and as nothing is eternal, I don't know where to place it where it will be more reliable than the link already provided.