Getting natbib to follow IEEE numeric citation format

Question

I'm wondering if anyone can suggest a better way to tweak natbib to generate numeric references that follow IEEE's citation reference guide and style manual. Specifically, IEEE wants each of a group of citations in separate brackets (like this: [1], [2]), but natbib seems to insist on grouping them (like so: [1, 2]).

The cite package handles this correctly, and I know the natbib IEEE templates are "not recommended" for IEEE submission, but I like being able to pull the name of the author(s) into the text sometimes, which natbib lets me do with \citet. Using natbib also lets me switch to author-year citations, if I end up having to change publications, without going through and changing every citation, which is also nice.

I can get close in natbib by setting the separator punctuation to ], [ (using \bibpunct), but natbib appears to add a hard-coded space after the separator (looks like this: [1], [ 2] (note the space in front of the 2; it looks more prominent in my typeset copy)). My solution at this point is to override one of the macros in natbib.sty in my own document, to remove the space (which can be put onto the end of the separator string if it's needed):

\makeatletter
\def\NAT@def@citea{\def\@citea{\NAT@separator}}% removed \NAT@space
\makeatother

Is there a more elegant and robust solution, with either cite or natbib? Or should I start looking into biblatex (which I've just found out about) for future work?

Answer 1

Your solution can't be improved very well. I recommend switching to biblatex.

However @Werner suggested a separate \cite command for each reference.

To avoid this you can use something like this:

\usepackage{letltxmacro}
\LetLtxMacro{\Origcite}{\cite}
\makeatletter
\renewcommand*\cite[1]{%
 \@for \i:={#1}\do{%
      \Origcite{#1}%
      }%
}

Note that with this way you lose the optional argument of \cite.