General ⇒ A question regarding natbib and DOI...

[Soroush]

I'm using natbib for putting references in my LaTeX document. I think it's great that DOIs are included in the references, as it helps readers to quickly find the relevant source. The same is true for URLs, however, URLs make the paper ugly! (two lines worth of links with all kinds of symbols and for each reference). I tend to put DOIs in my biblio database, but sometimes only URLs are available. Is there a way to suppress URLs from showing on the paper? (but keep DOIs). I assume I could use the 'plain' style over 'plainnat', but I like how the author name and year appears in the citation point.

Thanks.

[Alex B.]

This is a problem caused by the .bst file you're using (e.g. plainnat.bst in the case of "plainnat") for the bibliography. So all you have to do is to create and use your own .bst file with the help of custom-bib. Just open a DOS shell, run latex makebst and move the created .bst file to a location where LaTeX will find it, e.g. the location of your document.

If package "custom-bib" is installed on your machine the manual can be found in texmf\doc\latex\custom-bib. You can also modify your own .bst file manually with any text editor. Personally, I have no experiences with a custom style where DOIs are used and URLs are disabled but it should work anyway.

[Soroush]

Thanks Alex B.
Seems a bit tricky. I guess I'll have to read the manual and see how to use this.