BibTeX, biblatex and biber ⇒ How to make the bibliography look in a certain way...

[DennisL]

Hi all,

I was asked by an editor to make sure that the bibliography of an
article is of the form
Smith, A. B. [2001]: 'On Brown's Structural Anti-anti-realism',
Journal of Synthetic Analysis, 72, pp. 123–56.
Tavistock, M. [1917]: A Treatise on Structures, London: Webster Press.
Verne, I. E., Brown, P. F. and Kemp, K. [2005]: 'Structures and their
forms', in M. S. Peters and K. Kemp (eds), 2005, The State of
Structuralism, Boston, MA: MIT Press, pp. 51–7.
I think I managed to do almost all of it by using
\usepackage[square]{natbib}
\bibliographystyle{agsm}
However, one thing is missing, and I just spent hours trying to find
out how to change it: as it is, I have commas after, say, "Smith, A.
B. [2001]" rather than colons. Does anybody know how to change that?
Also, but maybe less crucially, I do not have parentheses around
"eds", but commas (again).

Thanks a lot in advance!
Dennis

[localghost]

See if you can find an appropriate one among the predefined styles [1]. Otherwise try to build your own style by using custom-bib. Another alternative could be to use biblatex.

[1] BibTeX Style Examples


Best regards and welcome to the board
Thorsten

[DennisL]

Hi Thorsten,
thanks a lot for the advice - I will try out both options!
And thanks for the nice welcome!!
Very best,
Dennis

[kaiserkarl13]

You might also edit the .bst file you're using (save it under a different name, of course), and change the comma to a colon in the appropriate line.

I don't have agsm.bst, but I have xagsm.bst. You might have to make a new function that does the same as output.nonnull except that it puts a colon after the block instead of a comma; then change the appropriate calls to output.nonnull so that the punctuation after the year changes.

For your editors question, the file xagsm.bst contains the following:

Code: Select all

FUNCTION {format.editors}
{ editor empty$
    { "" }
    { "{vv~}{ll}{, jj}{, f.}" editor format.names
      editor num.names$ #1 >
    { ", eds" * }
    { ", ed." * }
      if$
    }
  if$
}

Change the ", eds" to "(eds.)" and ", ed." to "(ed.)" and you're set. Good luck!