Badbox with Bibtex, how to fix it?

Question

The problem:

How to fix bad boxes done by bibtex? Latex copy and paste bibtex formatted entries to the text, but these entries exceed the correct space.

Details: I using main.tex with this header:

\documentclass[a4paper,12pt,fleqn,oneside,openright]{book}

with this content at the end of it:

\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{Referências Bibliográficas}
\bibliographystyle{apalike}
\bibliography{12.Referencias_Bibliograficas}

I had too this bibtex entry:

@BOOK{chenpatton:99,
  AUTHOR =       "J. Chen and R. J. Patton",
  TITLE =        "Robust model-based fault diagnosis for dynamic systems",
  PUBLISHER =    "Dordrecht:   Kluwer Academic Publishers",
  YEAR =         "1999"

}

and finally this phrase:

A literatura apresenta muitas classes de estratégias para tratar o problema de FDI \cite{chenpatton:99}.
Estas estratégias podem ser, em geral, classificadas em abordagens baseadas em modelos quantitativos ~\cite{VR:03I} ~\cite{VR:03III} e em modelos qualitativos \cite{VR:03II} \cite{VR:03III}. Esta classificação é ilustrada na Figura~\ref{benchmark_1}.

My problem is, after the compilation I have this badbox

and I don't know how to fix it.

See if I put a ~ before this cite looks like nothing happens and I have the same badbox. If I put a \\ I lose the justified text

How can I solve this?

Answer 1

We almost had a diplomatic crisis between Italy and Brazil, so per peer pressure, I'm writing down this answer. :)

egreg and I came to the same solution, so here it is.

1. Use \usepackage[square, authoryear]{natbib} instead of \usepackage[round]{natbib}. The package options mean:

   • square: says that references are to be enclosed in square bracket rather than round parentheses.
   • authoryear: used for author–year citations.

2. Use \citep instead of \cite. Please note that \citep is a natbib exclusive command. It is used for parenthetical citations.

Hopefully we get rid of the bad blocks that way. :)

Answer 2

Insert \linebreak where the line should end. Unlike \\, \linebreak will keep the line justified.