Revtex warning with bibtex

Question

I get a warning every time I run bibtex on files using revtex4-1. The warning is

Warning--jnrlst (dependency: not reversed) set 1

This even happens with files revtex supplies as examples, but I've cut it down to a (nearly) minimal working example: SimpleTex.tex is

\documentclass[aps,prd,10pt]{revtex4-1}
\begin{document}
Refer to Ref.~\cite{ArticleKey}.
%\bibliographystyle{apsrev4-1}
\bibliography{SimpleBib}
\end{document}

and SimpleBib.bib is

@Article{ArticleKey,
  title =    {Cited work},
  journal =  "Awesomeness",
  author =   {Annie Author},
  year =     1999
}

Then, latex SimpleTex followed by bibtex SimpleTex gives me the warning. Interestingly, it appears to be using apsrev4-1.bst. But by explicitly giving the bibliographystyle (uncommenting the line in SimpleTex.tex), the warning goes away.

I realize that this is just a warning and could be ignored, but my automatic compilation scheme (emacs) complains that there's a warning every time, so I'd really like to get rid of it. Is it safe to just use the \bibliographystyle statement? Any idea why that appears to work?

Answer 1

Indeed it's just a warning and you are expected to ignore it. You could make it go away by arranging for SimpleTexNotes.bib to contain control lines:

@CONTROL{REVTEX41Control}
@CONTROL{apsrev41Control,author="48",editor="1",pages="0",title="",year="1"}

instead of the author="8" line that was there previously. This explicitly activates jnrlst rather than having it set as a dependency. For example you could have your build process run sed over the SimpleTexNotes.bib before running bibtex. Using bibliographystyle causes revtex to not emit the \citation{REVTEX41Control} \citation{apsrev41Control} lines to the aux file, since non-revtex bst files will not understand these. In this particular case the revtex4-1.bst defaults to the correct settings equivalent to @CONTROL{apsrev41Control,author="48",editor="1",pages="0",title="",year="1"} as desired, but in other cases it may not do as you would want. For example adding the longbibliography option to the \documentclass{revtex4-1} line would have no effect.