Imagine you are writing up your latest thrilling piece of science in your favourite odt or docx format. Nothing comes from nothing so you need to cite the 50 or so people whose ideas you built on, or who came to conclusions that contradict yours. Suddenly you realize that your second sentence needs a reference… and this will require you to renumber the subsequent 50. What a drag! There goes 5 minutes of your life that could have been better spent drinking beer.

Had you written your research in latex instead, this drudgery would have been replaced by a range of much more interesting and intractable difficulties. In latex it is easy to automagically renumber everything just by recompiling the document. Unfortunately, it is often hard to direct latex’s magic… just try moving a picture an inch to the right, or reformatting a reference.

Moving figures around is still a black art as far as I’m concerned… but I’ve recently found out an easy way to reformat references. This might be especially handy when you find out that your sort of proteins fall out of the scope of the International Journal of Eating Disorders and you now want to submit to a journal that requires you to list authors in small-caps, and the dates of publication in seconds from the Unix epoch.

A good way of including references in latex is with a “.bib” file and a “.bst” file. An example of the end of a document is shown below.


\bibliographystyle{myfile}
\bibliography{mycollection}

\end{document}


What’s happening here? All my references are stored in bibtex format in a database file called “mycollection.bib”. A separate file “myfile.bst” says how the information in the database should be presented. For example, are references in the text of the form (Blogs et al 2005) or are they numbered (1)? At the end of the text are they grouped in order of appearance, by date of publication or alphabetically? If alphabetically does “de Ville” come under “d” or “v”? To reformat a reference, we simply need to change “myfile.bst”.

Most latex distributions come with a set of bibliography styles. Some examples can be found here (a page which also explains all of the above much better than I have). However, it is very easy to produce a custom file using the custom-bib package. After a one-click download it is as simple as typing:


latex makebst.ins
latex makebst.tex


Here’s a screenshot to prove it. At the bottom is the first of thirty or forty multiple-choice questions about how you want your references to look. If in doubt, just close your eyes and press return to select the default.

The problem with a multiple-choice fest is that if you make a poor decision at question 28 you have to go through the whole process again. Fortunately, this can be circumvented — as well as generating a pretty “myfile.bst” file, the custom-bib package generates an intermediate file “myfile.dbj”. Changing your multiple-choice answers is just a matter of commenting out the relevant parts and typing “latex myfile.dbj”. A snippet of a “dbj” file is below:

Selected options are those without a “%” sign on the left hand side. Who would have thought that Latex could be so cuddly?