Use different bibliography styles for the same BibTeX database

Question

I have a bibtex database which I'm sharing between a beamer presentation and my thesis. I would like the former to show just the title and authors of the article instead of the whole citation, since it doesn't otherwise fit in the presentation frame.

Any ideas on how to do that?

Answer 1

You can modify the bibliography style (.bst) to achieve your goal. However, is a laborious task, and may be error prune.

So, lets say you have the plain.bst style. Then you just need to find the FUNCTION {article}, FUNCTION {book}, and so on. In general, you need to modify each FUNCTION {<entry>} that you want to use in your bibliography, and remove the undesired fields from there.

Like this example

FUNCTION {article}
{ output.bibitem
  format.authors "author" output.check
  new.block
  format.title "title" output.check
%  new.block
%  crossref missing$
%    { journal emphasize "journal" output.check
%      format.vol.num.pages output
%      format.date "year" output.check
%    }
%    { format.article.crossref output.nonnull
%      format.pages output
%    }
%  if$
%  new.block
%  note output
  fin.entry
}

the commented parts are the ones that will get removed from the final part. And you can save the modified style, let's say myplain.bst and use it like:

\documentclass{standalone}
\usepackage{cite}

\usepackage{filecontents}

\begin{filecontents}{mybib.bib}
@ARTICLE{Bar2011,
  author = {F. Foo and F. Bar},
  title = {Foo and Bar},
  journal = {Journal of Foo},
  year = {2011},
  volume = {1},
  pages = {1--3}
}

@ARTICLE{Foo2011,
  author = {F. Foo and F. Bar},
  title = {More on Foo and Bar},
  journal = {Journal of Bar},
  year = {2011},
  volume = {1},
  pages = {1--3},
  owner = {adin},
  timestamp = {2011.12.01}
}
\end{filecontents}

\begin{document}

Test~\cite{Bar2011,Foo2011}.

%\bibliographystyle{plain}
\bibliographystyle{myplain}
\bibliography{mybib}

\end{document}

Minimal (using myplain.bst):

Full (using plain.bst):

Answer 2

The rendering of BibTeX entries is performed by a bibliography style file (.bst). The file to be used is selected with the \bibliographystyle{...} command. Check out the styles available by default and see if there is one that fits your needs -- cj or abbrv seem to be interesting, but both include the year.

If you really want to get rid of the year (I wouldn't do that in a scientific presentation), you'll have to copy and edit one of the .bst files, but this is quite a nightmare.