Single line bibliography in bibunit

Question

I would like to shrink to a single line or a single paragraph my bibliography once I print it by \putbib[<mybibfile>] within a section using bibunit package. A related post suggests a potential way yet for a global bilbiography environment. And in fact adding the \renewenvironment{thebibliography} as suggested in that post before loading natbib and bibunit does not have any effect in my case. If I do it after natbib or bibunit the compilation halts with several errors. Any suggestions? I specify that I am using BibTeX and compiling either with PDFLateX or 'XeLateX` insofar as unfortunately, this is a preset class for a job application that I cannot modify.

In particular my setup looks right now as following:

\documentclass{<my_doc_class>} %my_doc_class is a child of 'article'
\usepackage{mathtools}
\usepackage[francais,english]{babel}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc} %% For ISO-latin1 chars (accented letters).
\usepackage{txfonts} % Use Times, Helvetica fonts

\usepackage{graphicx} % For the Inria logo and other figures
\parindent 0pt
\usepackage[cm]{fullpage} % Use the entire page (1.5 cm margins everywhere)

%-----------------------
% GENERAL SETTINGS
%-----------------------
\usepackage{paralist}
\usepackage{enumitem}

%-----------------------
% BIBLIOGRAPHY
%-----------------------
\renewenvironment{thebibliography}[1]{%
   \section*{\refname}\inparaenum[{[}1{]}]}{\endinparaenum}
\renewcommand{\bibitem}[1]{\item}

\usepackage[numbers,super,sort,compress]{natbib}
\usepackage[subsectionbib]{bibunits}
\usepackage{hyperref}
\usepackage{doi}

\begin{document}
\bibliographyunit[\section]
\defaultbibliographystyle{naturemag_doi}

...
...

\section{Contribution~1}
\vspace{1em}
\subsection{\BiLingual{Description de la contribution}{ / }{Description of the contribution}}

<some text with several \citep{...} commands>
...
...

\putbib[mybib_file]

\section{Contribution~2}

<some text with several \citep{...} commands>
...
...
\putbib[mybib_file]

...
...
\end{document}

Each command \putbib will print the "Bibliography" per each section as:

[1] Ref. 1

[2] Ref. 2

[3] Ref. 3
...
...   

Instead what I would like, due to the space limitations of the document I am working with, is to have each Bibliography as

[1] Ref. 1 [2] Ref. 2 [3] Ref. 3 ...

The naturemag_doi bst file is some custom bibliography style that I preliminarly compiled by makebst. It is not crucial here. You can consider and other standard natbib style like apalike if it ease to work out a solution.

Answer 1

Ok, after a while, I ultimately figured out that biblatex is better to handle this case. So in the preamble, I declared:

\usepackage[backend=bibtex,
            maxnames = 3,
            firstinits=false,
            uniquename=init,
            autocite=superscript,
            style=nature,
            articletitle=false,
            natbib=true]{biblatex}
% Add BIB files            
\addbibresource{my_publications.bib}
\addbibresource{my_resstat.bib}

% Define environment for single-line bibliography in the subsection
\defbibenvironment{oneline}
{}
{}
{\addspace
 \printtext[labelnumberwidth]{%
   \printfield{prefixnumber}%
   \printfield{labelnumber}}%
 \addhighpenspace}

This will automatically make the bibliography in each section/subsection lumped in a single line or paragraph. It is not, properly speaking, the answer to my original question, but rather a workaround. Nevertheless, the reason I ultimately switched to biblatex in this case is because I needed to do several fine tunings on my bibliography, in addition to this one posted here, and as excellently explained here, and in the biblatex manual, the advantages bore by biblatex over natbib in customizing bibliographies are worth to spend an initial additional time to figure out how to make it work.