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

bibtexnatbib

I use the natbib package (with the default authoryear option) and the apalike bibliography style for bibliographies.

I would like to cite the following bibtex entry:

@article{Lake2010/11,
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}}

When I use \citep{Lake2010/11} I get the right output in my bibliography

Lake, David A. (2010/11), Two Cheers for Bargaining Theory: Assessing Rationalist Explanations of the Iraq War, International Security, 35(3), 7–52.

However, the citation callout in the text is wrong: (Lake, 1011) instead of (Lake, 2010/11)

The problem seems to be the truncation of the year. So I changed the following line

year field.or.null purify$ #-1 #4 substring$

year field.or.null purify$ #-1 #14 substring$

Now I get the following output in the text: (Lake, 201011) — the slash (/) is missing.

Why?

Best Answer

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".)

enter image description here

\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}

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] Suppress field using chicago bibliography style

The bibliography style file chicago.bst is quite ancient; according to the header information given in the file, it was last updated in 1992 [!]. If you're stuck with chicago.bst, though, you may want to do the following:

Find the file chicago.bst in your file system (likely under ../bibtex/bst/chicago, where .. is the root of the TeX distribution), make a copy and call the new file, say, mychicago.bst.
Open mychicago.bst in your favorite text editor
Search for the function FUNCTION {output.year.check} (it starts on line 266 in my copy of this file). In this function, replace the line
```
{ ", " * month * ")" * }
```
with
```
{ ")" * }
```
(I.e., make BibTeX do the same thing whether or not a month field is present in a given entry.)
Regarding how (not) to process the contents of a note field (assuming one is present): For this case, I recommend that you go through each of the 12 instances of so of the following two lines
```
new.block
note output
```
and choose which instances you want to comment out (using %, as usual) and which ones you want to keep. I could imagine you'd want to comment out these instructions for entries of type @article and @book, whereas you may well want to keep them for entries of type @misc and @unpublished.
Save the file and update the TeX filename database if necessary. E.g., if you use TeXLive or MacTeX, you could type texhash at a command prompt.
Use the bibliography style mychicago from now on.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

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

[Tex/LaTex] Suppress field using chicago bibliography style

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