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<head>
<title>UK TeX FAQ -- question label whatbst</title>
</head><body>
<h3>Choosing a bibliography style</h3>
<p/>A large proportion of people are satisfied with one of Patashnik’s
original “standard” styles, <i>plain</i>, <i>unsrt</i>,
<i>abbrv</i> and <i>alpha</i>. However, no style in that set
supports the “author-date” citation style that is popular in many
fields; but there are a very large number of contributed styles
available, that <em>do</em> support the format.
<p/>(Note that author-date styles arose because the simple and clear
citation style that <i>plain</i> produces is so awkward in a
traditional manuscript preparation scenario. However, TeX-based
document production does away with all those difficulties, leaving us
free once again to use the simple option.)
<p/>Fortunately, help is at hand, on the Web, with this problem:
<ul>
<li> a sample text, showing the sorts of style choices available, can
be found on
<a href="http://www.cs.stir.ac.uk/~kjt/software/latex/showbst.html">Ken Turner’s web site</a>;
<li> an excellent survey, that lists a huge variety of styles,
sorted into their nominal topics as well as providing a good range
of examples, is the Reed College
“<a href="http://web.reed.edu/cis/help/LaTeX/bibtexstyles.html">Choosing a BibTeX style</a>”.
</ul>
<p/>Of course, these pages don’t cover everything; the problem the
inquisitive user faces, in fact, is to find what the various available
styles actually do. This is best achieved (if the links above don’t
help) by using <i>xampl.bib</i> from the BibTeX documentation
distribution: one can get a pretty good feel for any style one has to
hand using this “standard” bibliography. For style
<i>my-style.bst</i>, the simple LaTeX document:
<blockquote>
<pre>
\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
\bibliographystyle{my-style}
\nocite{*}
\bibliography{xampl}
\end{document}
</pre>
</blockquote><p>
will produce a representative sample of the citations the style will
produce. (Because <i>xampl.bib</i> is so extreme in some of its
“examples”, the BibTeX run will also give you an interesting
selection of BibTeX’s error messages…)
<dl>
<dt><tt><i>xampl.bib</i></tt><dd><a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/biblio/bibtex/distribs/doc/xampl.bib">biblio/bibtex/distribs/doc/xampl.bib</a>
</dl>
<p/><p>This question on the Web: <a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=whatbst">http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=whatbst</a>
</body>
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