Bibtex: adjust bst to include doi as link only?

Question

I would like to have the doi shown in the bibliography as a single link, i.e. it should be shown as an hyperlink with title doi instead of printed as doi:10.1038/s1231.

I found the nice urlbst, which allowed to take any bib style and have the doi printed as text, using: urlbst --doi --hyperref style.bst styleNew.bst This even nicely prints doi:10.1038/s1231 while adding a hyperlink with https://doi.org/10.1038

To have doi shown as hyperlink, I tried \renewcommand{\url}[1]{\hyperlink{#1}{doi}}, however I am facing two issues:

• This only works for bibtex URL fields, not doi fields
• This actually prints URLs, while I would like only to show dois.

Thanks!

Answer 1

If you're willing to indulge in a bit of bst style-hacking, then you could take your .bst file, as generated by urlbst, and make the following replacement:

FUNCTION {format.doi}
{ doi empty$
    { "" }
    %{ doiprefix doi * doiurl doi * make.href }
    { "doi" doiurl doi * make.href }
  if$
}

(that is, replacing the commented-out line with the line below it).

That appears to produce the formatting you're looking for, with just ‘doi’ as the link text.

Hmm: it occurs to me that urlbst could make this easier. There are already a couple of settings advertised at the top of the generated .bst files. It wouldn't be unreasonable to add a further switch to have the .bst files generate \doi{<content-of-doi-field} instead of what they do now. Looking at my diary, it looks like I'll have some urgent procrastination coming up, so...