Unwanted commas in formatted bibliographic entries

Question

I'm quite new to latex and related stuff but I cannot get one thing to work for me.

Consider the following bib entry:

@book{latexcompanion,
    author    = "Michel Goossens and Frank Mittelbach and Alexander Samarin",
    title     = "The LaTeX Companion",
    year      = "1993",
    publisher = "Addison-Wesley",
    address   = "Reading, Massachusetts"
}

I'm getting output in bibliography with (to me) irritating commas after surnames:

[2] Goossens, M., Mittelbach, F., and Samarin, A. The LaTeX Companion.
Addison-Wesley, Reading, Massachusetts, 1993.

By any possibility is it some popular error, or would I have to dive into bst files to fix this? In this particular example I replaced the bst provided ( yes, i replaced style in .cls too) and it happened with .bst from folder I've found in Bibtex (acm.bst).

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

As @AlanMunn has already pointed out in a comment, the presence of a comma between an author's formatted surname and the initials of his/her given name(s) is not an error. Instead, it is actually a fairly common stylistic choice for displaying authors' names.

The preamble of the file acm.bst contains the following information:

% ACM Transactions bibliography style (8-Dec-10 version)

% A lot like abbrv.bst, but names come out "Last, initials", and in \sc.

% Some dates are parenthesized.

Note that the comma feature and the fact that names are typeset in small-caps are mentioned explicitly.

Have you tried using the unsrt bib style yet? Aside: If you employ the natbib citation management package, you may want to use unsrtnat instead of unsrt. It's a reimplementation of the much older unsrt bib style, but with the ability to (a) process fields such as url, issn, and isbn and (b) produce authoryear-style citation callouts as well as the basic numeric-style call-outs.

---

Assuming that you wish to continue using the acm bibliography style and simply desire to have no commas between surnames and initials, I suggest you proceed as follows.

• Find a copy of the file acm.bst in your TeX distribution.

• Make a copy of this file and name the copy, say, acm-nocommas.bst. Do not edit an original file of the TeX distribution directly.

• Open the file acm-nocommas.bst in a text editor. The editor you use to edit your tex files will do fine.

• In this file, locate the function called format.names. (In my copy of this file, the function starts of line 190.)

• In this function, locate the line

      { s nameptr "{vv~}{ll}{, jj}{, f.}" format.name$ 't :=
  

  In case you're curious: vv, ll, and jj refer to the (unabbreviated) von, lastname (or surname), and junior components of a person's full name, while f. refers to the abbreviated given (or first) name component.

• Change this line to

      { s nameptr "{vv~}{ll}{ f.}{, jj}" format.name$ 't :=
  

  Observe that two changes have been applied: (i) there's no longer a comma immediately before f. and (ii) the "junior component" is now placed last, still offset with a comma from the rest of the name. I think it's essential to set off any "junior component" in this manner.

• Save the file acm-mod.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 update the filename database of your text distribution suitably.

• In your main tex file, change the instruction \bibliographystyle{acm} to \bibliographystyle{acm-mod}. Next, perform a full recompile cycle: LaTeX, BibTeX, and LaTeX twice more.

Happy BibTeXing!

---

A full MWE and its output:

\RequirePackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents}{mybib.bib}
@book{latexcompanion,
  author       = "Michel Goossens and Frank Mittelbach and Alexander Samarin",
  title        = "The \LaTeX{} Companion",
  year         = 1993,
  publisher    = "Addison-Wesley",
  address      = "Reading, Massachusetts",
}
@article{lucas-rapping:1969,
  author       = "Lucas, Jr., Robert E. and Leonard A. Rapping",
  title        = "Real Wages, Employment, and Inflation",
  journal      = "Journal of Political Economy",
  year         = 1969,
  volume       = 77,
  number       = 5,
  pages        = "721--754",
}
\end{filecontents}

\documentclass{article}
\bibliographystyle{acm-mod}

\begin{document}
\cite{latexcompanion}, \cite{lucas-rapping:1969}
\bibliography{mybib}
\end{document}