Adjusted unsrtnat style with short author list

Posted on 2011-09-01 10:54:03
by Geert Vandeweyer

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Adjusted unsrtnat style with short author list

Posted on 2011-09-01 10:54:03
by Geert Vandeweyer

The unsrtnat natbib style is a very compact citing style in the main text, if setup to use numerical citations, with a sorted and compressed listing. The actual bibliography on the other hand can be very long, wasting a lot of paper. To compress the actual bibliography, I've created a new .bst file that mimicks the unsrtnat style but truncates the list of authors to a maximum of four, adding et al. To further reduce the amount of paper used by reference lists, I use the following commands: 

% add option to get bibliography for each chapter in book
\usepackage{chapterbib}
% sectionbib refers to the title style of the bibliography
\usepackage[numbers, square, sectionbib,sort&compress]{natbib}
%setspace packages allows to change interline distance
\usepackage{setspace}
% main line spacing in document is 1.5
\onehalfspacing

\begin{document}

This text was found in a paper \cite{thepaper}. This text also \cite{theotherpaper}

% set spacing to single
\begin{singlespace} 
% make the font smaller
\footnotesize
% use the short author style
\bibliographystyle{unsrtnatshort}
% tell the bib file to use
\bibliography{MyBibFile}
% set spacing to 1.5 again
\end{singlespace}

Installing a new natbib style

To install the natbib style, follow the steps below (tested only on Ubuntu)

# download the .txt file
wget 'http://geertvandeweyer.zymichost.com/files/unsrtnatshort.txt' 

# rename to .bst
mv unsrtnatshort.txt unsrtnatshort.bst

# move the file to the natbib directory
sudo mkdir /usr/share/texmf-texlive/bibtex/bst/MyStyles
sudo cp unsrtnatshort.bst /usr/share/texmf-texlive/bibtex/bst/MyStyles/

# update the tex files
sudo texhash

bibtex, LaTeX, natbib, preamble, whitespace