an IF for journals in a bibTex bst style file

Question

Currently, in my .bst file using BibTex, if an entry has both a Journal and an arXiv link, both are used in the citation. What I would like to do is use an "if" statement saying that if a Journal is defined, don't print the arXiv reference.

Any ideas?

I've uploaded the style file here if that helps.

Answer 1

In your .bst replace the function for article with

FUNCTION {article}
{ output.bibitem
  format.collaboration output
  format.authors "author" output.check
  format.title "title" output.check
  blank.sep
  crossref missing$
  { journal missing$   
    {}
    { format.journal add.doi "journal" output.check }
    if$
  }
  { format.article.crossref output.nonnull
    format.pages output
  }
  if$
  journal missing$
    { format.eprint output
      format.url output }
    'skip$
  if$
  note output
  new.sentence
  format.SLACcitation output
  fin.entry
}

The new bit is

  journal missing$
    { format.eprint output
      format.url output }
    'skip$
  if$

instead of

  format.eprint output
  format.url output

That means that now the eprint and url information is only printed if the journal field is absent.

\documentclass[british]{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{babel}
\usepackage{hyperref}

\usepackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@article{appleby,
  author  = {Humphrey Appleby},
  title   = {On the Importance of the Civil Service},
  year    = {1980},
  journal = {Civil Service Review},
  volume  = {138},
  number  = {3},
  pages   = {234-289},
  archive = arXiv,
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  eprint  = {1234.5689},
}
@article{elk,
  author  = {Anne Elk},
  title   = {On Brontosauruses},
  year    = {1972},
  archive = arXiv,
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  eprint  = {2234.5689},
}
@article{sigfridsson,
  author  = {Sigfridsson, Emma and Ryde, Ulf},
  title   = {Comparison of methods for deriving atomic charges from the
             electrostatic potential and moments},
  journal = {Journal of Computational Chemistry},
  year    = 1998,
  volume  = 19,
  number  = 4,
  pages   = {377-395},
  doi     = {10.1002/(SICI)1096-987X(199803)19:4<377::AID-JCC1>3.0.CO;2-P},
}
\end{filecontents}


\begin{document}
\cite{sigfridsson,appleby,elk}
\bibliographystyle{jwsmith}
\bibliography{\jobname}
\end{document}

produces