Natbib -- change author conjunction in citation call-out from 'and' to '&'

Question

I'm using natbib, german babel and natbib creates output of the form

Foo and Bar (1337)

I would like to get

Foo & Bar (1337) for citet and
(Foo & Bar 1337) respectively for citep.

Answer 1

Assuming you're using \bibliographstyle{plainnat}, put a copy of plainnat.bst in your working folder and rename it to myplainnat.bst (later, this file should go to the appropriate location in your local TEXMF folder). In this copy, look for FUNCTION {format.lab.names} and specifically for " and ". Replace the latter with " \& " and save your modified copy. Compile your .tex file with \bibliographstyle{myplainnat}. The expression "and" in citations (but not in the bibliography) should now be replaced with "&".

If you want "&" also as separator in the bibliography, replace every instance of " and " in plainnat (there should be three of them) with " \& ".

EDIT: At least with regard to citations, it works the same way with chicago.bst. I don't know how to get small caps with natbib, though. My advice would be to switch to biblatex -- see this question for details.

Answer 2

One option I have used previously is \renewcommand{\betweenauthors}{&} -- however it appears not to work with standard .bst files such as apalike.bst.

An alternative is to use the custom-bib package to generate your own .bst file - it does have an explicit option (AMPERSAND) that lets you choose between an and and an & in your list of authors.

Using custom-bib is as easy as running latex makebst.tex (e.g. latex /usr/local/texlive/2010/texmf-dist/tex/latex/custom-bib/makebst.tex for my installation) and following the prompts.