[Tex/LaTex] use hanging indentations for the bibliography references with bibtex

bibliographiesindentation

I have used hangparas from the hanging package, tried setting bibhang, setting parskip and leftindent to no avail. I have an author-year citation format and plainnat.bst and savetrees package if this matters…

Most help I find on this topic suggests use of biblatex but as I have not yet made the switch. I still find bibtex's multiple bibliography style option very useful so would like to stay with bibtex for now.

Edit: For example, I was hoping this would help, but it does nothing for the bibliography:

\begin{hangparas}{.25in}{1}
\bibliographystyle{plainnat}
\bibliography{references}
\end{hangparas}

I also tried

\setlength\parskip{\baselineskip}
\leftskip 0.1in
\parindent -0.1in
\bibliographystyle{plainnat}
\bibliography{references}

and

\setlength\bibhang{2em}
\bibliographystyle{plainnat}
\bibliography{references}

But there is no hanging indentation to be seen.

Best Answer

If you had posted a complete minimal example, you probably would've had a solution many hours ago. And, needless to say, if this solution doesn't work for you, you really need to post a similar example of your own that demonstrates the problem.

At any rate, this works for me:

\documentclass[12pt]{article}

\usepackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents*}{example.bib}
@book{smith2000,
  author =    {Smith, John},
  title =     {A Really, Really, Really Long Book Title So the Whole Entry Is More than One Line Long},
  address =   {City},
  publisher = {Some Publisher},
  year =      2000
}
\end{filecontents*}

\usepackage{natbib}
% \usepackage[normalbib]{savetrees}% older versions
\usepackage[bibliography=normal]{savetrees}% version 2.0 (2011/05/14)
\usepackage{lipsum}

\begin{document}

\cite{smith2000}
\lipsum[1]

\bibliographystyle{plainnat}
\bibliography{example}

\end{document}

In other words, savetrees allows you to set various options that determine how many trees you're going to save. In this case, the bibliography=normal option prevents savetrees from modifying the bibliography formatting.

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