Changing bibliography format

Question

I am using natbib for referencing. My current format is "Author, Title, Journal, Vol-pp, Year". What change should I make to bring year right after the author as in "Author, Year, Title, Journal, Vol-pp"?

Answer 1

After some pondering, I don't think I'll succeed in hacking natbib internals. As an alternative, you could switch to biblatex. In the following example, I have disabled sorting, combined the numeric-comp citestyle with the authoryear bibstyle, added a label to this bibstyle and changed some other settings to mimic the natbib output. (This may need further tweaking.)

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage[sorting=none,citestyle=numeric-comp,bibstyle=authoryear]{biblatex}

\DeclareFieldFormat{bibentrysetcount}{\mkbibparens{\mknumalph{#1}}}
\DeclareFieldFormat{labelnumberwidth}{\mkbibbrackets{#1}}

\defbibenvironment{bibliography}
  {\list
     {\printtext[labelnumberwidth]{%
    \printfield{prefixnumber}%
    \printfield{labelnumber}}}
     {\setlength{\labelwidth}{\labelnumberwidth}%
      \setlength{\leftmargin}{\labelwidth}%
      \setlength{\labelsep}{\biblabelsep}%
      \addtolength{\leftmargin}{\labelsep}%
      \setlength{\itemsep}{\bibitemsep}%
      \setlength{\parsep}{\bibparsep}}%
      \renewcommand*{\makelabel}[1]{\hss##1}}
  {\endlist}
  {\item}

\renewbibmacro{in:}{%
  \ifentrytype{article}{}{%
  \printtext{\bibstring{in}\intitlepunct}}}

\renewcommand*{\newunitpunct}{\addcomma\space}

% The following hack only works for some values of the "mergedate" option
\renewbibmacro*{date+extrayear}{%
  \iffieldundef{year}{%
    }{%
    \addcomma\space
    \printtext{\printdateextra}%
  }%
}

\usepackage{filecontents}

\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@article{Bli74,
  author = {Blinder, Alan S.},
  year = {1974},
  title = {The economics of brushing teeth},
  journaltitle = {Journal of Political Economy},
  volume = {82},
  number = {4},
  pages = {887--891},
}
\end{filecontents}

\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}

\begin{document}

\textcite{Bli74}

\printbibliography

\end{document}

Answer 2

The bibliography style you describe is fairly common in economics and finance journals. I recommend you check out the style file jf.bst (short for "Journal of Finance") located at http://www.ivo-welch.info/computers/bstfiles/. (Professor Welch lists many more bst files on this site.) If all else fails, you could always run the program makebst.tex through LaTeX to build your own bst file interactively. If the file makebst.tex isn't already on your computer system, you can obtain the latest version of this file from http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/custom-bib/.