Specific Square Bracket Citation using Natbib

Question

I want to use natbib package. This is the requirement of the journal citations:

1. References should be cited in text in square brackets by giving the last name of the author and the date of publication, e.g. [Wong (1989)]. For papers by two authors, the last names are joined by “and” e.g. [Al-Hussaini and Abd-El-Hakim (1989)].

With natbib, two authors will be joined using '&', how to change that?

2.References are given in brackets unless the author’s name is part of the sentence, e.g. “the a-model [Gupta et al. (1997)]” but “according to Gupta et al. [1997].”

I cannot use the square option in natbib as it will change all other citation of year to square. But I want to use [year] in text citation only. How to set that?

Answer 1

It's straightforward to achieve your formatting objective by creating variants of the \citet and \citep commands.

\documentclass{article}
\begin{filecontents}[overwrite]{mybib.bib}
@misc{wong:89,author="Wong",title="{AA}",year=1989}
@misc{aa:89,author="Al-Hussaini and Abd-El-Hakim",title="{BB}",year=1989}
@misc{gupta:97,author={Gupta and X and Y},title="{CC}",year=1997}
\end{filecontents}

\usepackage[round,authoryear]{natbib}
\bibliographystyle{unsrtnat} % or some other suitable bib style
%% created "bracketed" variants of \citep and \citet
\newcommand\brcitep[1]{[\citet{#1}]}
\newcommand\brcitet[1]{\citeauthor{#1} [\citeyear{#1}]}

\begin{document}
\setlength\parindent{0pt} % just for this example
\brcitep{wong:89}

\brcitep{aa:89}

\brcitep{gupta:97}

\dots\ according to \brcitet{gupta:97} \dots
\bibliography{mybib}
\end{document}