Revtex warning with bibtex

Question

I get a warning every time I run bibtex on files using revtex4-1. I realize that this is just a warning and could be ignored, but my automatic compilation scheme (emacs) complains that there's a warning every time, so I'd really like to get rid of it. The warning is

Warning--jnrlst (dependency: not reversed) set 1

This even happens with files revtex supplies as examples, but I've cut it down to a (nearly) minimal working example: SimpleTex.tex is

\documentclass[aps,prd,10pt]{revtex4-1}
\begin{document}
Refer to Ref.~\cite{ArticleKey}.
%\bibliographystyle{apsrev4-1}
\bibliography{SimpleBib}
\end{document}

and SimpleBib.bib is

@Article{ArticleKey,
  title =    {Cited work},
  journal =  "Awesomeness",
  author =   {Annie Author},
  year =     1999
}

Then, latex SimpleTex followed by bibtex SimpleTex gives me the warning. Interestingly, it appears to be using apsrev4-1.bst. But by explicitly giving the bibliographystyle (uncommenting the line in SimpleTex.tex), the warning goes away.

Is it safe to just use the \bibliographystyle statement? Any idea why that appears to work?

Answer 1

Indeed it's just a warning and you are expected to ignore it. You could make it go away by arranging for SimpleTexNotes.bib to contain control lines:

@CONTROL{REVTEX41Control}
@CONTROL{apsrev41Control,author="48",editor="1",pages="0",title="",year="1"}

instead of the author="8" line that was there previously. This explicitly activates jnrlst rather than having it set as a dependency. For example you could have your build process run sed over the SimpleTexNotes.bib before running bibtex. Using bibliographystyle causes revtex to not emit the \citation{REVTEX41Control} \citation{apsrev41Control} lines to the aux file, since non-revtex bst files will not understand these. In this particular case the revtex4-1.bst defaults to the correct settings equivalent to @CONTROL{apsrev41Control,author="48",editor="1",pages="0",title="",year="1"} as desired, but in other cases it may not do as you would want. For example adding the longbibliography option to the \documentclass{revtex4-1} line would have no effect.

Answer 2

As of late 2019 (REVTeX 4.2c), this is still an issue. I still find that the only reasonable solution is to add \bibliographystyle{apsrev4-2} before the \bibliography command.

In general the \bibliographystyle given should match the style REVTeX would use according to the class options: apsrev4-2 (default, most aps), apsrmp4-2 (aps,rmp), aipnum4-2 (aip numeric styles), aipauth4-2 (aip author-year styles), aapmrev4-2 (aapm).

The REVTeX-selected .bst can also be checked in the BibTeX log:

This is BibTeX, Version 0.99d (TeX Live 2022)
Capacity: max_strings=200000, hash_size=200000, hash_prime=170003
The top-level auxiliary file: output.aux
The style file: apsrev4-2.bst