[Tex/LaTex] BibTex doesn’t recognize the author field on the bibliography entry

bibtexnatbib

I have a pst2.bib database with only one entry:

@book{jackson91,
    author    = "Jackson, John David",
    title     = "Classical Electrodynamics",
    publisher = "John Wiley \& Sons, Inc.",
    address  = "New Jersey, USA",
    edition  = "3",
    year      = "1991"
}

At the end of my .tex file I have the following code:

According to \citet{jackson91}, blah blah...

\bibliographystyle{plain}
\bibliography{pst2}

and at the beginning I'm importing the natbib package.

The output of this is

According to (author?) [1], blah blah…

If I change \citet{jackson91} to \cite{jackson91} it just goes

According to [1], blah blah…

but I want to use the \citetcommand from natbib.

It seems that the referencing engine manages to identify my BiBTeX entry from the database, but doesn't manage to identify the various fields in the entry. Why not? How do I fix this?

Best Answer

Use plainnat instead of plain.

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{natbib}

\usepackage{filecontents}

\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@book{jackson91,
    author    = "Jackson, John David",
    title     = "Classical Electrodynamics",
    publisher = "John Wiley \& Sons, Inc.",
    address  = "New Jersey, USA",
    edition  = "3",
    year      = "1991"
}
\end{filecontents}

\begin{document}

According to \citet{jackson91}, blah blah...

\bibliographystyle{plainnat}
\bibliography{\jobname}

\end{document}

enter image description here

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] Truncation of “year” field in author-year citations using “apalike” bibliography style

I should note that although this sort of citation is common, it's not very good practice: the article you are citing does have a year, namely the year of the draft you read, and should be cited with that year, and a note saying that it is to appear. See Which publication type for forthcoming papers in BibTeX? for some ideas on how best to implement this.

That being said, it's not that difficult to modify the bibliography style to allow this kind of year.

This truncation is a property of how the apalike.bst style is set up. Make a copy of apalike.bst and make the following modification to it. Save it as myapalike.bst in your local texmf folder. It should go in <path/to/local>/texmf/bibtex/bst (where the path is dependent on your OS). Then use \bibliographystyle{myapaplike} in your document.

Find the FUNCTION calc.label: it should look like the following:

FUNCTION {calc.label}
{ type$ "book" =
  type$ "inbook" =
  or
    'author.editor.key.label
    { type$ "proceedings" =
        'editor.key.label                       % apalike ignores organization
        'author.key.label                       % for labeling and sorting
      if$
    }
  if$
  ", "                                                  % these three lines are
  *                                                     % for apalike, which
  year field.or.null purify$ #-1 #4 substring$          % uses all four digits
  *
  'label :=
}

Change the line

year field.or.null purify$ #-1 #4 substring$          % uses all four digits

to be:

year field.or.null purify$ #-1 #64 substring$          % allow many characters

[Tex/LaTex] Contents of title field “all lowercase” for BibTeX entry

You pose two questions. First, to keep the words in the title field -- other than the first one, viz., "Google" -- from becoming set in all-lowercase, encase the publication's title in a second pair of curly braces. I.e., set up the field as

title = {{Google App Engine Datastore Java API}},

The second question is about how to change the ordering of the output of the fields url and note, given that you're using the agsm bibliography style. The problem with this request is that the ordering of fields of various entry types (article, book, techreport, ...) is currently consistent across all of these entry types in the agsm style. It might look downright weird to your readers if the ordering were changed for some entry types only. I would therefore advise against fiddling with the ordering of the fields in the function misc of the file agsm.bst. If you do decide to edit that file, be sure to save it under a new name (say, myagsm.bst) rather than overwriting the existing file.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] Truncation of “year” field in author-year citations using “apalike” bibliography style

[Tex/LaTex] Contents of title field “all lowercase” for BibTeX entry

Related Question