[Tex/LaTex] Which \bibliographystyle covers which BibTeX entries

bibtex

I fail in finding overview of default bibliography styles. I am curious which is covering which fields. So far I know that difference between alphaurl and alpha is field url. What are other differences between style ?
I am exporting my collection to bibtex file, so I'd like to know which fields are going to stay, which are going to disappear.

Best Answer

Indeed, there's a plethora of bibliography style files (extension .bst), but no central repository that lists what each of them does. The four "classic" .bst files -- thus-named because they came with the initial release of BibTeX -- are "plain.bst", "unsrt.bst", "alpha.bst", and "abbrv.bst"; see the BibTeX manual for information on these styles.

The "classic" style files were designed originally for numeric citation methods, but citation management packages such as harvard and natbib were developed that let you use these style files with author-year citation methods. The natbib package comes with abbrvnat.bst, unsrtnat.bst, and plainnat.bst, all of which recognize more fields -- including, you guessed it, the "url" field -- than the classic style files do.

The "classic" bst files recognize the following fields for an entry (of course, not all fields make sense for all entries):

address, author, booktitle, chapter, edition, editor, 
howpublished, institution, journal, key, month, note, 
number, organization, pages, publisher, school,
series, title, type, volume, year

The natbib bst files, in addition, recognize (i.e., "know what to do with") the following five fields:

doi, eid, isbn, issn, url

Assuming that quite a few of your entries will have url and doi fields, I recommend you go for one of the newer bst files rather than stick with the classic ones.

A big plus of the natbib package (which lets you do both numeric and auhor-year type citations, by the way) is that it works very well with the hyperref package. If hyperref is a package you're contemplating using, but if you're already using harvard and don't want to re-write all citation commands just to conform to the natbib syntax, don't despair: From now on, just load both the natbib and har2nat packages (and don't load the harvard package anymore). The har2nat package, you guessed it, translates the "harvard"-style citation commands into "natbib"-style citation commands...

I don't deprecate any testing ;-) -- all standard styles are available as biblatex styles here: trad-biblatex

The following remarks requires biblatex 2.0 or newer!

The aim is to setup standard bibliography styles which allow all modifications provided by BibLaTeX. In the first step the implementation of the entry types @BOOK, @ARTICLE and @INCOLLECTION are on focus. The implemented styles are marked by a green check mark ;-)

Preface

The traditional BibTeX styles are providing the following fields and entry types.

Entry types:

article  book  booklet  inbook  incollection 
inproceedings conference manual mastersthesis 
misc phdthesis proceedings techreport unpublished

fields:

address   author    booktitle    chapter    edition
editor    howpublished    institution    journal
key    month    note    number    organization
pages    publisher    school    series    title
type    volume    year

All traditional fields and entry types are provided by BibLaTeX too. However BibLaTeX offers more entry types and fields. So I recommend by using BibLaTeX to change the bib entries related to BibLaTeX.

Modifications

The basic order and settings for all standard styles are equal. So I am providing a file trad-standard.bbx which yields the standard settings. The extra settings are done in the required bbx files.

First I collect some details of the style:

the sorting is chronological by AUTHOR then title then YEAR
Names are printed as: Firstname (no initials) Surname
all names are printed; et~al. is set as a replacement of and others in the field
the field title is printed with emphasis for the entry types:
```
book  inbook  manual  phdthesis  proceedings
```

the field title is printed as normal for the entry types:

article  booklet  conference incollection  inproceedings
mastersthesis  misc  techreport  unpublished

all other fields are printed as \normalfont
the journal title isn't introduced by a string in, excluding @incollection
_{ordering of entries can be seen in the examples}

Style `plain`

all entries are numbered

Style `unsrt`

equal to the style plain
sorting scheme is none.

Style `alpha`

NOTE: requires biber

standard with a label

Style `abbrv`

equal to plain
usage of abbreviation

Usage

This current development branch can be found at github: biblatex-trad

All traditional bibliography styles can be loaded via options by the package biblatex:

\usepackage[style=trad-plain]{biblatex}

This method allows the using of all options provided by biblatex. Available styles will be (not yet):

trad-plain which emulated plain
trad-unsrt which emulated unsrt
trad-alpha which emulated alpha
trad-abbrv which emulated abbrv

_{I hope I didn't forget any traditional style}

Some technical hints will be collected in the documentation.

Documentation

A small documentation is available at biblatex-trad

Results:

trd-plain

enter image description here

References

Based on the example given by lockstep here the required result:

enter image description here

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

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!

Best Answer

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