Comma in bibliography item of weblinks

Question

I need to cite few website links in my report. I am getting the reference listed in bibliography like following.

, , “Title of the webpage”, http://www.somesite.com, accessed: 2013-07-22.

How do I remove the two commas at the beginning ?

(The two fields before the two commas are Author and Year in my bibliography style. Unfortunately, the Author and Year information are not available for the website links)

The bibtex entry is

@misc{weblinkkey,
  title = {Title of the webpage},
  howpublished = {\url{http://www.somesite.com}},
  note = {Accessed: 2013-07-22}
}

Note: A solution without changing the .bst file will be of great help. I am using a custom made bibliography style, created using custom-bib/makebst.

Answer 1

You mention that you've used the makebst utility to create your own custom .bst file. It looks like you've really customized the innards of the {misc} function. I say this, without having seen the .bst file, because most bibliography styles I'm familiar with -- including many created by makebst -- would produce something like this given the bib entry you've shown:

Notice that there are no leading commas separating any blank spaces. This is no coincidence, because @misc is usually BibTeX's entry type of "last resort": It has no required fields at all, and it's thus set up not to insert commas between non-existent fields. (An error message will, however, be generated if every single field is blank.)

Not having access to your .bst file, I can only suggest that you replace your current misc function with a more basic version, i.e., something like this one:

    FUNCTION {misc}
    { output.bibitem
      format.authors output
      author format.key output
      title howpublished new.block.checkb
      format.title output
      howpublished new.block.checka
      howpublished output
      format.date output
      format.issn output
      format.url output
      new.block
      note output
      fin.entry
      empty.misc.check
    }

(This is, incidentally, the form of the function provided by the makebst utility.) Of course, if you don't want certainly fields (such as issn and url) printed out at all, you would just omit the corresponding format.<xyz> output statements.