Is there a way I can specify a placeholder text for citations in which bibliographies are missing? For instance, I would imagine the syntax might look something like \citep[Author, Year]{AuthorYear}. I tried using \defcitealias but I guess that does not work if the bibliography entry is missing.
[Tex/LaTex] natbib: temporary citation for missing references
natbib
Related Solutions
The elsarticle class loads natbib by default so you don't need to load natbib via \usepackage. By default it loads it with a numerical scheme, but the class option authoryear will change that. The matching bibliography style is then elsarticle-harv:
\documentclass[preprint,11pt,authoryear]{elsarticle}
\begin{document}
I once read \citep{wolf2009regional}.
\bibliographystyle{elsarticle-harv}
\bibliography{ML}
\end{document}
Assuming you have no truly odd characters in the year field, i.e., if the field contains just digits and the occasional / ("slash") character, it suffices to change the line
year field.or.null purify$ #-1 #4 substring$
in the file apalike.bst to
year field.or.null #-1 #14 substring$
Actually, you should make this change to a copy of the file apalike.bst; don't edit an original file of the TeX distribution directly.
The main change is the elimination of the BibTeX built-in function purify$. (As you can probably guess, the function purify$ purges all non-numeric characters from the field. In the present case, this turns out to be too much of a good thing.)
Save the file myapalike.bst (or whatever you may have called the file) either in the directory where your main tex file is located or in a directory that's searched by BibTeX. If you select the second method, be sure to update the filename database of your TeX distribution appropriately.
Here's the result of a full MWE. (Note that you should encase "Iraq War" in an extra pair of curly braces, to prevent BibTeX from lowercasing the letters "I" and "W".)
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents*}{\jobname.bib}
@article{Lake201011,
Author = {Lake, David A.},
Journal = {International Security},
Number = {3},
Pages = {7-52},
Title = {Two Cheers for Bargaining Theory: Assessing Rationalist Explanations of the {Iraq War}},
Volume = {35},
Year = {2010/11},
}
\end{filecontents*}
\usepackage{natbib}
\bibliographystyle{myapalike}
\begin{document}
\citep{Lake201011}
\bibliography{\jobname}
\end{document}
Best Answer
Define a temporary command in your preamble:
and use
\citetemp{Author, Year}in the document body, with whatever you like, sayIt will be easy to use your editor's search facility for finding
\citetempand fix it with the key.