Displaying BibTeX item in References without label

Question

I'm using apalike-letters bibliography style and the references are displayed like this:

Is it possible to hide the label in each reference? So that the display be:

Alsop, K., Fereday, S., Meldrum, C., Defazio, A., Emmanuel, C., George, J., Dobrovic, A., Birrer, M. J., Webb, P. M., Stewart, C., Friedlander, M., Fox, S., Bowtell, D., and Mitchell, G. (2012). BRCA Mutation Frequency and Patterns of Treatment Response in BRCA Mutation-Positive Women With Ovarian Cancer: A Report From the Australian Ovarian Cancer Study Group. J Clin Oncol.

(without the label in square braces).

I know it's stupid but I have such requirements…

Please note that I don't want to use natbib because I have very large document and natbib generates some strange errors while compiling…

You can find the whole project (with the style file in it) at http://piec.info/apalike-letters_test.zip [76 KB].

Answer 1

If you are using the article document class, you can redefine \thebibliography and the \@biblabel command to remove the labels. You need to redefine \thebibliography so that the list indent parameters are set correctly. If you are using a different document class you'll need to modify the appropriate code from that class, but the code should be similar.

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\makeatletter
\renewcommand{\@biblabel}[1]{}
\renewenvironment{thebibliography}[1]
     {\section*{\refname}%
      \@mkboth{\MakeUppercase\refname}{\MakeUppercase\refname}%
      \list{}%
           {\labelwidth=0pt
            \labelsep=0pt
            \leftmargin1.5em
            \itemindent=-1.5em
            \advance\leftmargin\labelsep
            \@openbib@code
            }%
      \sloppy
      \clubpenalty4000
      \@clubpenalty \clubpenalty
      \widowpenalty4000%
      \sfcode`\.\@m}
\makeatother
\usepackage{breakcites}

\begin{document}
\section{Lorem Ipsum}
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Fusce eget elit \cite{pmid17728093, pmid22711256} nibh, eu porta nunc. Phasellus arcu urna, auctor condimentum dapibus eu, porttitor ut leo \cite{pmid22711256}. Donec nisi purus, faucibus quis cursus nec, lacinia in nibh. Aliquam quis tellus at nisl laoreet porttitor ut eget nibh. Donec congue, nisi vitae blandit fringilla, felis orci porta lorem, et semper lorem nibh in ante \cite{pmid22711854}. Aenean sed dui eget sapien porta imperdiet id ut metus. Cras sed justo est, vel tincidunt nulla. Maecenas hendrerit, purus et gravida commodo \cite{pmid22711857}, mauris augue gravida orci, et posuere est est in nunc. Nulla sodales congue accumsan \cite{pmid22712020}.

\bibliographystyle{apalike-letters}
\bibliography{test}

\end{document}