General ⇒ natbib | Trouble with customized Bibliography Style File

[bfulcher]

Hi,

I have encountered a problem with selecting a \bibliographystyle and using \citet with natbib.
Everything works fine when I use one of the supplied natbib styles (i.e., plainnat, abbrvnat, or unsrtnat) -- the author names are recognized and printed perfectly when using \citet and using the natbib package as follows:

Code: Select all

\usepackage[square,comma,numbers,sort&compress]{natbib}

When I use makebst to make my own .bst bibliography style file and use it, the \cite commands and everything works fine, but the \citet commands now return an error: instead of quoting the author as "Smith et al. [1]", I get "(author ?) [1]".

The .bst files generated using the makebst package are supposed to be compatible with natbib (in fact I believe that creator of natbib developed makebst) but for some reason I cannot get this to work. I'm not quite sure what to do if I want to use my own custom bibliography style file, other than to abandon the elegant \citet commands, and simply manually add the author names every time I want to use this functionality.
Any ideas? Thanks so much.

Ben

[bfulcher]

Ok, well I've solved this -- if anyone else has this problem thought I'd explain here.
When going through makebst you have to select author-year under STYLE OF CITATIONS.
and not numerical, as is the default choice. This then allows the option of an author-year support system such as natbib in a subsequent option (AUTHOR-YEAR SUPPORT SYSTEM).
By going through the .dbj file and changing these two options, all worked out fine.
I assumed that makebst would have this functionality regardless, but it seems these options need to be selected for natbib to work. In this sense, I find it a little strange perhaps that numerical is the default option (making the .bst files produced from makebst incompatible with natbib by default).
Live and learn!

[Stefan Kottwitz]

Great, thank you for the explanation! So if anyone comes here by googling, he can find it.

Stefan