LyX ⇒ Lyx, BibTex, beamer and apacite: a lethal combination?

[alfo]

Hello,

I'm relatively new to Lyx and Latex and I'm attempting to put together a presentation that has some references. Ideally, I would like to use BibTex so that only references I use in the presentation are added to the bibliography section. However, as noted in other posts this seems to be a difficult task. For example, this post

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.editors. ... eral/65936

suggests adding the bibliography manually. While this approach works, in my opinion it kind of defeats the purpose of using Lyx/Latex altogether as you won't be benefiting from the automation it offers.

The best results I could achieve with the Lyx-BibTex-beamer combination are accomplished when following these steps:

1. New from Template and select beamer-conference-ornate-20min.lyx
2. Go to the bottom of the document and remove all the stuff relating to the references (from \beamertemplatebookbibitems till the end frame).
3. Insert a BibTex bibliography. Select a BibTex database and select apalike2 as style. (If you use other apa-related styles such as apacite you'll get compile errors)
4. Go somewhere else in the document (e.g. at the end of an itemise item)
5. Insert a citation from your BibTex database (Insert -> Citation).
6. Compile and View.

You will notice that a reference to the citation you added appears at the end of the presentation. And you'll also notice the citation we inserted appears where it's supposed to appear. However, it appears with square brackets, e.g.:

[Chomsky, 1957]

while I would prefer normal parentheses:

(Chomsky, 1957)

In a normal article, I would achieve this through:

7. Documents -> Settings -> Bibliography. Select Natlib, style: Author-year.

But if you do that in the beamer document, you get Latex errors (such as "LaTeX Error: \newblock undefined").

I use Lyx 2.0 but this also happens with Lyx 1.6.9 too.

It’s a tiny detail but for me it’s quite a big issue. So for now I’m resorting to the manual method described above. But I’d love to hear if people know of a workaround so that BibTex can be used with beamer.

Thanks,
Alfo