I need my bibliography style for the journal "International Interactions"

Question

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.

Answer 1

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:

...

...

...

...

...

...

...

---

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!