Bibliographic style file: .bst
Il documento LaTeX deve specificare uno tile per la bibliografia. Questo viene fatto con il comando:
\bibliographystyle{}.
Valori comuni sono \bibliographystyle{plain} e \bibliographystyle{abbrv}.
I fle di stile BibTeX, per i quali è comune l'estensione .bst, vengono scritti in un semplice file separato che descrive come gli oggetti in bibliografia vadano formattati. Il programma BibTeX formatta allora gli oggetti in bibliografia secondo lo stile specificato nel file, tipicamente generando comandi TeX o LaTeX per la formattazione; esistono comunque fogli di stile per generare come output un documento HTML.
Fogli di stile personalizzati possono essere facilmente generati tramite il comando latex makebst.
Examples
A .bib file might contain the following entry, which describes a mathematical handbook:
@Book{abramowitz+stegun,
author = "Milton Abramowitz and Irene A. Stegun",
title = "Handbook of Mathematical Functions with
Formulas, Graphs, and Mathematical Tables",
publisher = "Dover",
year = 1964,
address = "New York",
edition = "ninth Dover printing, tenth GPO printing"
}
If a document references this handbook, the bibliographic information may be formatted in different ways depending on which citation style (APA, MLA, Chicago etc.) is employed. The way LaTeX deals with this is by specifying \cite commands and the desired bibliography style in the LaTeX document. If the command \cite{abramowitz+stegun} appears inside a LaTeX document, the bibtex program will include this book in the list of references for the document and generate appropriate LaTeX formatting code. When viewing the formatted LaTeX document, the result might look like this:
- Abramowitz, Milton and Irene A. Stegun (1964), Handbook of mathematical functions with formulas, graphs, and mathematical tables. New York: Dover.
Depending on the style file, BibTeX may rearrange authors' last names, change the case of titles, omit fields present in the .bib file, format text in italics, add punctuation, etc. Since the same style file is used for an entire list of references, these are all formatted consistently with minimal effort required from authors or editors.
Last name prefixes such as von, van and der are handled automatically, provided they are in lower case to distinguish them from middle names. Multiple word last names are distinguished from first and middle names by placing them the last names first, then a comma, then the first and middle names. Name suffixes such as Jr., Sr., and III are generally handled by using two comma separators as in the following example:
@Book{hicks2001,
author = "von Hicks, III, Michael",
title = "Design of a Carbon Fiber Composite Grid Structure for the GLAST
Spacecraft Using a Novel Manufacturing Technique",
publisher = "Stanford Press",
year = 2001,
address = "Palo Alto",
edition = "1st,",
isbn = "0-69-697269-4"
}
If the author does not use a comma to separate the name suffix from the last name, then curly brackets {Hicks III} may be used instead.
Style files for different uses
There are many different style files ‘readymade’ for different journals. If you need to customize citation styles even further you can use the natbib or jurabib packages, or use the makebst package.