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I am trying to conform to the bibliography style guide for the journal International Interactions. I can't find a standard bibliography style that fits their criteria. It's similar to APA (e.g., year in parentheses after the author block), but they want no comma after the journal name, they want the first names spelled out, and they want a dot ("period") at the end of the author block (and immediately before the year).

I've tried setting the bibliography style as apalike, newapa, and maybe 50 others, but none seem to both make the first names spelled out and remove the comma after the journal name. I found one (forgot which) that did those things but then made the journal number bold. The style that seems closest to what they want is apalike, but it has the comma after journal name and shortens the author first names in the bibliography to initials.

I'm hoping there's an easy solution. I'm using TeXworks on a Mac, and natbib, my sources are in BidDesk.

Thanks!

Here's a MWEB:

\documentclass[12pt, letterpaper]{article}

\usepackage{filecontents}
\usepackage[longnamesfirst]{natbib} 
\bibpunct{(}{)}{;}{a}{}{}

\begin{filecontents*}{\jobname.bib}

@article{graham2005economic,
  title={The economic implications of corporate financial reporting},
  author={Graham, John R and Harvey, Campbell R and Rajgopal, Shiva},
  journal={Journal of Accounting and Economics},
  volume={40},
  number={1},
  pages={3--73},
  year={2005},
  publisher={Elsevier}
}
\end{filecontents*}

\begin{document}

Let's cite \cite{graham2005economic}

\bibliographystyle{apalike}
\bibliography{\jobname} 

\end{document}

My in-text citation call-outs are fine. My book entries seem fine, except the first name should be spelled out. The articles need first name spelled out, no punctuation after the journal title, and a period after the author block.

Here is how they want books:

Anderson, Benedict. (1983) Imagined Communities. Revised edition. London: Verso.

Here is how they want articles:

Anderson, Benedict. (1983) The New World Disorder. New Left Review 193(6):3–13.

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    Welcome! Please provide code for a minimal document demonstrating the issue i.e. an MWEB (Minimal Working Example with Bibliography). I've removed the texworks tag as your editor and platform are irrelevant. I've added bibtex since you are presumably using that, given the natbib. Please state whether you are required to use natbib and BibTeX or whether Biblatex/Biber is an option.
    – cfr
    Jan 10, 2018 at 0:24
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    'Similar to APA' sounds like the game of a thousand tweaks, asked for one-by-one (which is fine if you're willing to ask the questions one-by-one). You might you can speed the process along by providing a description of the actual style, however. (In addition to the MWE+B already requested.)
    – jon
    Jan 10, 2018 at 1:03
  • Your description of the required formatting elements is highly incomplete. How should entries not of type @article be formatted? Your write-up is also (probably unintentionally!) misleading: For instance, the apacite bibliography style inserts a comma, not a period, after the name of the journal. You should provide a link to the webpage that lists the formatting requirements exhaustively.
    – Mico
    Jan 10, 2018 at 1:15
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    @cfr - thanks for the help - I added a MWEB to the question above. Yes, bibtex and natbib. I'm not required to use natbib; Biblatex/Biber should be fine. Jan 10, 2018 at 4:19
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    I've perused the journal's formatting instructions, and I find them rather spotty and incomplete. For instance, no real mention is made of how entries with three or more authors should be formatted. Very discouraging, really. I think your best bet is to contact the journal's editorial staff to (a) raise these issues -- they may not even be aware of them! -- and (b) ask them if it's OK to go ahead and use a bibliography style such as apalike.
    – Mico
    Jan 11, 2018 at 3:23

1 Answer 1

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I suggest you proceed in two steps. First, create a new bst (bibliography style) file using the interactive makebst utility. (Open a command window and type latex makebst to get started.) Second, it will be necessary to make a minor edit, by hand, in the newly created bst file.


While answering the interactive, multiple-choice questions posed by makebst, choosing the default answer is correct in most instances. (That's why they're the defaults, right?) In same cases, though, you'll need to choose a non-default answer. The most important such cases are as follows:

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Let's assume you've named the new file ii-experimental.bst. Open this file in a text editor -- the program you use to edit your tex files will do fine -- and locate the function format.authors. It should look like this:

FUNCTION {format.authors}
{ author "author" format.names }

Change the code block to

FUNCTION {format.authors}
{ author "author" format.names
    "." *
}

I.e., add a new line that contains "." *. As you can probably guess, this additional instruction serves to add a dot ("period", "full stop") immediately after the final name in the author block.


In your main tex file, be sure to change the argument of \bibliographystyle to ii-experimental.bst (or whatever you chose to name the file). Save the new bst file either in the directory where your main tex file is located or in a directory that's searched by BibTeX. If you choose the latter option, be sure to also update the filename database of your TeX distribution suitably.

Last but not least, assuming you're using the natbib citation management package (with the option longnamesfirst), you should (a) use \citep exclusively to create citation call-outs, as all citation call-outs are supposed to be in "parenthetic" style, and (b) run the instruction

\setcitestyle{aysep={}}

after loading natbib, to suppress the comma between the author(s)'s surname(s) and the year(s). Finally, perform a full recompile cycle -- latex, bibtex, and latex twice more -- to fully propagate all changes.

Happy BibTeXing!

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