Issue with Springer spbasic

Question

I'm using natbib for an article to be published in a Springer journal. These are their official TeX/bibtex styles, which include a tex template and some bibtex/natbib styles.

If I use [smallextended]{svjour3} and the spbasic.bst style file, adding natbib to the header of the file, I get entries without dots after pp and the authors' initials:

Chevalier J, Mayzlin D (2006) The Effect of Word of Mouth on Sales: Online Book Reviews. Journal of Marketing Research pp 345–354

Instead of

Chevalier J., Mayzlin D. (2006) The Effect of Word of Mouth on Sales: Online Book Reviews. Journal of Marketing Research, pp. 345–354.

Similarly, I get et al in the text instead of et al.. This happens even with a minimal example, adding one entry to the official template.tex. If I don't add natbib to the .tex file, I get even worse results, such as:

[Chevalier and Mayzlin(2006)] Chevalier J, Mayzlin D (2006) The Effect of Word of Mouth on Sales: Online Book Reviews. Journal of Marketing Research pp 345–354

I've seen this issue before, but I can't track it down. I'm sure it happens to other authors too.

Any idea?

Answer 1

As far as I know most Springer journals use a style without period after name initials and page abbreviation, and in my experience the Springer editorial staff will edit your bibliography. So I would suggest not to change the style, but if you really want, you can do the following modifcations.

1. Locate spbasic.bst in your disk, make a copy, let us say myspbasic.bst
2. Use you favourite text editor to edit myspbasic.bst
3. Locate FUNCTION {bbl.pages} and FUNCTION {bbl.page} in the file. They are around line 266 in my copy.
4. change "pp" and "p" into "pp." and "p."
5. Locate FUNCTION {format.names} (it starts at line 455 in my copy). Change the line "{vv~}{ll}{ f{}}{ jj}" to "{vv~}{ll}{ f.}{ jj}", and remove the line remove.dot.