[Tex/LaTex] Fine tuning the agsm bibliography style, and adding links

bibliographiesharvard-stylenatbib

Lovely day. I am quite new to LaTeX but picking things up fast. One area which is confusing me greatly is getting my bibliography to work just how I like it.

I have settled on the agsm style and the natbib citation management issue, but there are still some issues.

The volume number of a journal is set in bold. (blue in pic)
I want it to just be plain (un-bolded).
The journal titles have apostrophes around them. (red in pic)
I want to get rid of the apostrophes.

This image added highlights these problems.

Lastly, for the electronic copy, I would like it so the journal identifiers (DOIs) are highlighted blue, so you can click on them and it takes you to the website of the journal article. (green in pic)

Help on any / all of the above would be greatly appreciated. I have searched online for about 8 hours and finally need to ask the lords of TeX.

Edit: This is my bibliography code so far I forgot to add:

\documentclass[11pt,a4paper]{report}
\usepackage[numbers]{natbib}
\renewcommand\harvardyearleft{\unskip, }
\renewcommand\harvardyearright[1]{.} 
\bibliographystyle{agsm}
\usepackage{hyperref}
\begin{document}
\cite{ref1}
\bibliography{bibFile}
\end{document}

Note – that \renewcommand I found from this forum; it gets rid of brackets around the year field which I didn't want.

Best Answer

Find the file agsm.bst and make a copy, say, myagsm.bst. Next, open the new file in a text editor of your choice and search for the following line:

{ volume embolden field.or.null

(It's on l. 357 in my copy of the file.) Change this line to

{ volume field.or.null

i.e., tell BibTeX not to render the volume number in bold.

Third, look for the line

    { format.title quote "title" output.check }

inside the function named article. (It's on l. 698 in my copy of the file.) Change it to

    { format.title "title" output.check }

i.e., tell BibTeX not to place (single) quotes around the title. Finally, save the new file, update the TeX filename database if necesssary (say, by running texhash if you use TeXLive or MacTeX), and start using the new bibliography style by issuing the command

\bibliographystyle{myagsm}

from now on.

I should note that this is all extremely hack-ish. What you really ought to do is to run the utility program makebst, which will pose lots and lots of questions on just how you want to set up your custom .bst file. This utility will then create a brand-new bibliography style file that is based on the answers you provided. To run this utility, at a command prompt type latex makebst and follow the prompts.

An important additional advantage of using the makebst utility is that it will let you set up exactly what you think should happen with the contents of a field called doi. This is something you simply can't do by hacking the file agsm.bst -- short of a complete rewrite of the entire file, of course -- because the agsm bibliography style is quite old and doesn't even recognize the contents of a field named doi.

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] Removing the quotations marks from the bibliography using harvard style (agsm)

make yourself a copy of agsm.bst, and call it agsm-nq.bst (in the same directory as your document).

edit agsm-nq.bst, and search for the line with "FUNCTION {article}"

the start of the function is:

FUNCTION {article}
{ output.bibitem
  list.label.output
  " \harvardyearleft " list.year * "\harvardyearright " * output.nonnull
  author "author" item.check
  title.field field.used =
    { skip$ }
    { format.title quote "title" output.check }
...

in the last line, there, there's the function that puts the quote in. change the line to read:

    { format.title "title" output.check }

now change

\bibliographystyle{agsm}

\bibliographystyle{agsm-nq}

in your document, and the quotes won't be created.

you can do similar things to other reference types, if they too have that quote function in them

[Tex/LaTex] modify the ‘agsm’ bibliography style in two ways

I suggest you proceed as follows.

Locate the file agsm.bst in your TeX distribution. Make a copy of this file and name the copy, say, agsm-mod.bst. (Do not edit an original file of the TeX distribution directly.)
Open the file agsm-mod.bst in a text editor. The editor you use to edit your .tex files will do fine.
Let's tackle the easier task first: Changing the quoting style from single quotes to double quotes. In agsm-mod.bst, locate the function called quote. (In my copy of this file, the quote function starts on line 155.) In this function, locate the following line:
```
    { "`" swap$ * "'" * }
```
Change it to
```
    { "``" swap$ * "''" * }
```
This change will affect not only how titles of entries of type @article are typeset; it will also affect the titles of entries of type @misc and @booklet. I'm assuming that you're OK with this.

The much harder task, actually, is changing publisher, address to address: publisher for entries of type @book. It turns out to be necessary to provide several new BibTeX functions in order to accomplish this task. This is because the stock agsm style is programmed to use commas between fields everywhere; using a colon between two particular fields (here: address and publisher) is not something this bib style does easily.

Start off by inserting the following code chunk between the functions multi.page.check and format.pages.

FUNCTION {bibinfo.warn}
{ swap$
  duplicate$ missing$
    {
      swap$ "missing " swap$ * " in " * cite$ * warning$ pop$
      ""
    }
    { duplicate$ empty$
        {
          swap$ "empty " swap$ * " in " * cite$ * warning$
        }
        { swap$
          pop$
        }
      if$
    }
  if$
}

FUNCTION {bibinfo.check}
{ swap$
  duplicate$ missing$
    {
      pop$ pop$
      ""
    }
    { duplicate$ empty$
        {
          swap$ pop$
        }
        { swap$
          pop$
        }
      if$
    }
  if$
}

FUNCTION {format.org.or.pub}
{ 't :=
  ""
  address empty$ t empty$ and
    'skip$
    {
      address "address" bibinfo.check *
      t empty$
        'skip$
        { address empty$
            'skip$
            { ": " * }
          if$
          t *
        }
      if$
    }
  if$
}

FUNCTION {format.publisher.address}
{ publisher "publisher" bibinfo.warn format.org.or.pub
}

Next, locate the book function in the file agsm-mod.bst. In this function, locate the following two lines
```
      publisher "publisher" output.check
      address output
```
Replace these two lines with (I think you can already guess...)
```
      format.publisher.address output
```
And, while you're at it, you should replace the same pair of lines in the functions inbook and incollection as well. (Just search for the two remaining instances of publisher "publisher" output.check in the bst file.)
Save the bst file either in the directory where your main tex file is located or in a directory that's searched by BibTeX. If you choose the second option, be sure to also update the filename database of your TeX distribution suitably.
Finally, in your main tex file, change the instruction
```
\bibliographystyle{agsm} 
```
to
```
\bibliographystyle{agsm-mod} 
```
and perform a full recompile cycle: LaTeX, BibTeX, and LaTeX twice more.

For good measure, here's an MWE (minimum working example) that demonstrates the result of using the agsm-mod bibliography style.

\RequirePackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents}{mybib.bib}
@article{a,
  author   = "Anne Author",
  title    = "Thoughts",
  year     = 3001,
  journal  = "Circularity Today",
  volume   = 1,
  number   = 2,
  pages    = "3-4",
}
@book{b,
  author   = "Brenda Buthor",
  title    = "Further Thoughts",
  year     = 4001,
  publisher= "Publisher",
  address  = "Some Place, XY",
}
\end{filecontents}

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{harvard}
\bibliographystyle{agsm-mod}%

\begin{document}
\cite{a}, \cite{b}
\bibliography{mybib}
\end{document}

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] Removing the quotations marks from the bibliography using harvard style (agsm)

[Tex/LaTex] modify the ‘agsm’ bibliography style in two ways

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