BibTeX, natbib: weird (wrong?) order of the bibliography database fields in the final output?

Question

MWE for the problem I encountered:

\documentclass{article} 
\usepackage{natbib}
\begin{document}
Some text here. \citep{Meier1992}
\bibliographystyle{plain} 
\bibliography{references}
\end{document}

where the file 'references.bib' contains the following:

@INCOLLECTION{Meier1992,
  author = {Meier, U.},
  title = {Strengthening of Structures},
  booktitle = {Prestressing of Concrete},
  publisher = {Blackie Academic},
  year = {1992},
  editor = {Clarke, J.L.},
  pages = {153--171},
}

Compiling this produces (something like) this:

Meier, U.(1992). Strengthening of structures. In Clarke, J., editor, Prestressing of Concrete, pages 153–171. Blackie Academic.

while I was expecting something like this:

Meier U,(1992) ‘Strengthening of structures’, In Prestressing of Concrete, ed. J L Clarke, Blackie Academic,pp 153–171.

If you notice, the problem is the reversed placement of the editor and booktitle fields. Instead of:

...In booktitle, editor...

the order is:

...In editor,booktitle...

which looks weird to me. Can this be fixed?

P.S.: TeXLive 2011, Ubuntu 11.10

Answer 1

Yes, It can be fixed. I modified the file chicago.bst to allow you to obtain the desired result. Unfortunately the file is too big to paste it here; you can find it here in pastebin. Please save the file with the name myrefs.bst in a directory where TeX can find it (your current working directory, for example) and, in your document, use

\bibliographystyle{myrefs}

Delete all auxiliary files and process your document in the usual way. Here is a minimal working example:

\begin{filecontents*}{mybibtest.bib}
@INCOLLECTION{Meier1992,
  author = {Meier, U.},
  title = {Strengthening of Structures},
  booktitle = {Prestressing of Concrete},
  publisher = {Blackie Academic},
  year = {1992},
  editor = {Clarke, J.L.},
  pages = {153--171},
}
\end{filecontents*}
\documentclass{article} 
\usepackage{natbib}
\begin{document}
Some text here. \citep{Meier1992}
\bibliographystyle{myrefs} 
\bibliography{mybibtest}
\end{document}

And here's the result:

Answer 2

When I run your MWE, I get neither the result you report getting nor the result you say you would like to get, but instead something rather different:

E.g., no quotation marks around title, year at end instead of after author, first names' initials before last names for both author and editor, page information before publisher, ...

In other words, it looks like you need a completely different bibliography style from plain.bst (or plainnat.bst) in order to achieve your objectives. I recommend you run latex on the file makebst.tex; this file should be in your TeXlive2011 distribution. It's a completely menu-driven system which asks you a lot of questions about how you would like to have your bibliography formatted. Its output will be a new .bst file that will generate a bibliography according to your formatting wishes. Suppose the file is called "newrefs.bst"; you should invoke it with the command \bibliographystyle{newrefs}.