Natbib agsm - Remove comma between last name and first name & swap last and first name

Question

I'm using natbib for my bilbiography (and I'm working on Overleaf), and I want to have the same format as Harvard style for this, so I use the style agsm, but I want to have the first name then the last name and I want to remove comma between this. So for example: I have this in my .bib file

@article{label1,
    author  = {Daniel Aubier and Nicole Silvie and Jean Tetrae}
    % ....}

And I have this kind of result actually:

Aubier, D., Silvie, N. and Tetrae, J.

But I want this:

D. Aubier, N. Silvie and J. Tetrae

I know this isn't the real Harvard style, but I want to keep the essential of Harvard style, with this particularity.

Thank for your help!

Answer 1

I suggest you proceed as follows:

• Find the file agsm.bst in your TeX distribution. Make a copy of this file and call the copy, say, myagsm.bst. (Don't edit an original, unrenamed file from the the TeX distribution directly.) If you can't find the file inside Overleaf, you may try downloading it from

  https://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/harvard/agsm.bst
  

• Open the file myagsm.bst in a text editor. The editor you use for your .tex files will do fine.

• In myagsm.bst, replace both instances of the string

  "{vv~}{ll}{, jj}{, f.}"
  

  with the string

  "{f. }{vv }{ll}{, jj}" 
  

  There are two instances of this string: one each in the functions format.authors and format.editors.

• Save the file myagsm.bst 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.

• In your main tex file, change the instruction \bibliographystyle{agsm} to \bibliographystyle{myagsm} and perform a full recompile cycle -- LaTeX, BibTeX, and LaTeX twice more -- to fully propagate all changes.

Happy BibTeXing!

Two final comments/notes: (a) There is no unique harvard style, and it's not clear what a "real" harvard style might be. (b) Harvard style, also known as author-year style, is generally considered to be about the formatting of the citation call-outs rather than about the formatting of the bibliographic entries.

---

A full MWE (minimum working example):

\RequirePackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents}{mybib.bib}
@misc{label1,
  author = {Daniel Aubier and Nicole Silvie and Jean Tetrae},
  title  = {Thoughts},
  year   = 3001,
}
\end{filecontents}

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[comma]{natbib}
\bibliographystyle{myagsm}

\begin{document}
\citet{label1}
\bibliography{mybib}
\end{document}