Remove square bracketed citation in my reference list while using cite package for citations

Question

I would like to remove the duplicate of square bracketed citation in my bibliography list and start with just the name and year. I am using the cite package, and the \bibliographystyle{apalike}, with Citavi reference editor. I've seen this question a lot and the common answer is to use natbib package instead. This is good idea however then I need to change all of the \cite in the document to \citep in order to have it in parentheses. And I am finished my entire (90 page) document (I know I should have fixed this at the beginning).. Is there a way to change them within the cite package? Or else is there an easy way to switch all of the \cite to \citep?

I should also note that I am a very beginner with Latex.

Answer 1

The apalike bibliography style can only produce authoryear-style citation call-outs, whereas the cite package is meant to be used exclusively with bibliography styles that produce numeric-style citation call-outs. Thus, if you need to use the apalike bibliography style, do not use the cite package.

You should load either the apalike or the natbib citation management package. The former is older, but has the "virtue" (such as it is) of making \cite generate "parenthetic" citation call-outs automatically. The natbib package is much newer and far more versatile than the apalike package. Its "downside", for your purposes at least, is that \cite behaves like \citet, i.e., it produces "text-style" rather than "parenthetic" citation callouts. I can think of two "fixes":

• Do a global search-and-replace of all instances of \cite{ in your document, replacing them with \citep{. (I strongly recommend this "fix".)

• Load the letltxmacro package and issue the instruction

  \LetLtxMacro\cite\citep
  

  in the preamble. (The \citep macro takes optional arguments; as such, using \let to assign it to \cite may produce weird and unpleasant errors.)

An MWE that uses the natbib package:

\RequirePackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents}{mybib.bib}
@misc{test, author = "Anne Author", title = "Thoughts", year = 3001}
\end{filecontents}

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{natbib,letltxmacro}
\LetLtxMacro\cite\citep % make '\cite' act like `\citep`
\bibliographystyle{apalike}

\begin{document}
\cite[see][p.~45]{test}
\bibliography{mybib}
\end{document}