[Tex/LaTex] Prevent BibTeX from printing the “and” word before final author’s name

bibtex

I'd like BibTeX to print authors' names in the following fashion:

S. Bouabdallah, A. Noth, R. Siegwart

For that to happen, according to what I've read already, the .bib code should look like below:

@inproceedings{BouabdallahPID,
    author = {Bouabdallah, S. and Noth, A. and Siegwart, R.},
    keywords = {quad},
    location = {Sendai, Japan},
    pages = {2451--2456},
    title = {{PID vs LQ control techniques applied to an indoor micro quadrotor}},
    year = {2004}
}

Instead, BibTeX keeps including the "and" word before last author's name, i.e.:

S. Bouabdallah, A. Noth, and R. Siegwart

How do I get rid of the "and" word?

I've tried alpha, plain, ams and acm styles so far, which made no difference, hence assumed style doesn't change this behavior, but may be wrong on this one. I'd like to stay with plain, though.

Best Answer

If you're using the plain bibliography style, you could proceed as follows to get BibTeX to replace the " and " connector between the penultimate and ultimate author names with a simple comma:

  • Make a copy of the file plain.bst and name it, say, myplain.bst. Do not directly edit/modify an existing file that comes with a TeX distribution.

  • Open the file myplain.bst in your favorite text editor and search for the function format.names. (It starts on l. 185 in my system's copy of plain.bst.) In the code of this function, look for the following lines (likely lines 195-201):

        { numnames #2 >
        { "," * }
        'skip$
      if$
      t "others" =
        { " et~al." * }
        { " and " * t * }

  • Modify the first and last of these lines so that the lines of code look like this:

        { numnames #1 >
        { "," * }
        'skip$
      if$
      t "others" =
        { " et~al." * }
        { " " * t * }

    I.e., change #2 to #1 on the first line, and " and " to " " on the last line of this group. It's necessary to make both modifications to get the proper treatment regardless of the number of authors -- as long as the number is greater than 1, of course.

  • Save the file, update your TeX distribution's filename database as needed, and start invoking the new bibliography style with the command \bibliographystyle{myplain}.

Happy BibTeXing!

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