BibTeX styles with the class amsart

Question

I have a quick question for BibTeX wizards who are familiar with amsart class. Namely, I am writing a paper with my buddy who is a Geophysicist. On the other hand, I am a mathematician with a knee-jerk reaction to use amsart for everything I write. I need to comply with the following.

Citations. Citations in the text should appear by the name(s) of the author(s), followed by the year of publication in parentheses, e.g., Hough and Martin (2002).

To my limited knowledge, AMS doesn't have a style that conforms to the above specification. I tried natbib package and plainnat style and it seems to do the trick. Am I missing anything? Is there a simpler way to conform to the above specification without using a separate package for BibTeX styles?

Answer 1

The site https://www.seismosoc.org/publications/bssa-submission-guidelines/, mentioned in your comment to @moewe, provides the following guidelines for how three types of bibliographic entries -- @article, @book, and @incollection -- should be formatted:

I don't think that either plainnat or abbrvnat provide decent approximations to these guidelines. The apalike bib style doesn't provide a perfect match either, but IMNSHO it does provide a reasonable first approximation. (If you need help adapting the apalike bib style to bold-face the volume number in entries of type @article, please post a separate question.)

Incidentally, for reasons I don't claim to understand, I could not get the code shown below to compile correctly when using the amsart document class. However, it compiles fine under the article class.

\documentclass{article} % select a suitable document class
\begin{filecontents}[overwrite]{mybib.bib}
@article{hough-martin:2002,
  author   = "Hough, Susan E. and Stacey Martin",
  year     = 2002,
  title    = "Magnitude estimates of two large aftershocks of 
              the 16 {December} 1811 {New Madrid} earthquake", 
  journal  = "Bull.\ Seism.\ Soc.\ Am.",
  volume   = 92,
  pages    = "3259-3268",
}
@book{gutenberg:1959,
  author   = "Gutenberg, Beno",
  year     = 1959,
  title    = "Physics of the Earth's Interior", 
  publisher="Academic Press", 
  address  = "New York", 
  pages    = "111-113",
}
@incollection{laster-etal:1967,
  author   = "Laster, Stanley J. and Milo M. Backus and Richard Schell",
  year     = 1967,
  title    = "Analog mode studies of the simple refraction problem",
  booktitle="Seismic Refraction Prospecting",
  editor   = "Albert W. Musgrave", 
  publisher="Society of Exploration Geophysics", 
  address  = "Tulsa, Oklahoma",
  pages    = "15-66",
}
\end{filecontents}

\usepackage[authoryear,round]{natbib}
\setlength\bibhang{0pt} % optional
\setlength\bibsep{1ex}  % optional
\bibliographystyle{apalike}

\begin{document}
\nocite{*}
\bibliography{mybib}
\end{document}