Over citation in Springer template with pdflatex

Question

I'm writing a paper for a Springer journal.

So I downloaded the LaTeX template.

http://www.springer.com/cda/content/document/cda_downloaddocument/LaTeX.zip

The problem is that multiple citations (e.g. \cite{A,B,C}) protrude into the right margin, i.e., no line break is added automatically.

In previous work [A, 2011, B, 2010, C, 2009]
, suggests

But I want to write it like this.

In previous work [A, 2011, B, 2010,
C, 2009], suggests

I use spbasic and apalike, but the problem is not fixed.

\bibliographystyle{spbasic}
\bibliographystyle{apalike}

Is there any good bibliography style for writing a Springer journal paper?

Or how can I solve this problem?

Answer 1

This is the journal's problem, not yours - the manuscript you send in for refereeing is in effect a draft, and it is the journal that will turn this into the proofs that are published. The editors usually like it if you use the official style files - I doubt any benefit from a more attractive review manuscript will outweigh the slight lack of professionalism that comes with sending a manuscript that does not use the correct style files. I recommend you do not worry about the citation protrusion.

Incidentally, you should not treat the part of citations within brackets as nouns: the excerpt you have should better be Previous work [A, 2011, B, 2010, C, 2009] suggests... or Previous work suggests ... [A, 2011, B, 2010, C, 2009], with the citation at the end of the sentence.

Answer 2

First, use only one bibliography style in your document. Here, I would suggest spbasic, as you would like to publish at Springer.

The spbasic style uses author-year citations, and formats bibitems accordingly. Therefore, you should use the natbib option of the svjour3 document class. This holds also for the apalike style.

\documentclass[smalcondensed,draft,natbib]{svjour3}

\begin{document}

Some leading text to push the citations~\cite{StGu92,GhJaEn20,MeGa05,Ma00,MuBeBoRo99,BaNi94,Ca04}.

% \bibliographystyle{apalike}
\bibliographystyle{spbasic}
\bibliography{test}
\end{document}

Without the natbib option:

With the natbib option: