In the discussion on standardizing a journal class, my natbib package has been frequently mentioned (positively, thank heavens), mainly by Sebastian and Phillip. I would like give a brief overview of it for those who are unfamiliar to it. Sebastian did ask me some time ago to write a TUGboat article on it, and, well, that is still on my todo list. Natbib.sty was originally made up to handle author-year citations. In this sense, it was far from the first such package. There were apalike, newapa, chicago, harvard, named, and so on. Each of these had its own bst files, which could only be used with that package. New \cite commands were necessary in every case, if only to distinguish between citations in text like Jones et al. [1995]. and parenthetical ones [Jones, et al. 1995]. That is the basic requirement for author-year citation (which apalike does not even fulfill). Additional requirements are commands for authors only, year only, both citation variants with full author list [Jones, Baker, Williams, and Gouge, 1995]. Chicago and especially harvard can handle these. But: each one has a different set of \cite variants to this. In that sense, natbib is no better, for it uses yet another set. However, natbib has developed further to have two main advantages over chicago and harvard: 1: it can read bst files intended for the other packages; 2: it can switch between numerical and author-year citation mode. Under point 1: natbib can even read plain.bst and the other numerical styles, but then can only produce numerical citations. I provided plainnat.bst, unsrtnat.bst, and abbrvnat.bst as natbib replacements for 3 of the 4 standard bst files that can be used with either numerical or author-year citations. Point 2 means that one can write the argument of Bright [1984] has been refuted [Smith et al. 1995] for author-year citation mode, and if one changes to numerical citations by selecting a \usepackage option, one gets, without any further change in the source text, the argument of Bright [23] has been refuted [54] (This requires that one uses an author-year bst, but any one will do, even those intended for harvard or chicago.) It is safe to say that natbib can do anything the other packages can do, and more. Some people might object, saying harvard can give citations with full author lists on the first citations, and short lists afterwards, whereas natbib can do this, but not automatically. I can refute this simply by saying that version 6.7, which is about to be released, also has this automatic feature. Phillip has talked about the natbib native format for \bibitem, which looks like this: \bibitem[Jones et al.(1995)Jones, Baker, Williams, and Gouge]{key}... This can only be used with natbib.sty; none of the others will treat this right. However, if natbib were to become quasi-standard, this is no problem. The only thing that worries me is that if I were starting from scratch today, I would invent \natbibitem with three clearly separated arguments for the year, short and full lists. As it is, I rely on the parentheses to act as delimiters to separate the three parts of the citation information, something that could cause trouble if an author's name contains parentheses. I have talked to Oren Patashnik about this, and there is a tendency to put square brackets into first names to indicate how the name abbreviated. I am toying with the idea of switching to \natbibitem once BibTeX 1.00 comes out. But of course, older syntaxes would still have to be supported. My other major contribution to bibliographying is custom-bib or makebst. This allows one to make up bst files from a gigantic master by selectively taking lines of code, governed by a set of options. An interactive menu system helps select these options, putting them into a docstrip batch job file, for future editing/correcting or rerunning on updates to the master file. There are over 100 options available, with the number growing. This will do for an overview. Now I should concentrate on writing the TUGboat articles, or getting the latest versions of natbib /makebst online. Patrick ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr. Patrick W. Daly Tel. [+49] 5556-979-279 Max-Planck-Institut fuer Aeronomie Fax. [+49] 5556-979-240 Max-Planck-Str. 2 D-37191 Katlenburg-Lindau Internet: [log in to unmask] Germany -----------------------------------------------------------------------------