Natbib problem

Anonymous1987

Hi, I'm using Natbib for my referencing, American Economic Review (aer) style, however whenever an author is listed twice or more it just places an "_" instead of the authors name in the second and subsequent listings of the author

e.g.
Stiglitz, Joseph, blah, blah, blah

_, blah, blah, blah

I checked an AER article, just to see maybe this is how they do it, but the the article bibliography just repeated the author's name instead of using an "_". Its not that big of a problem but it just doesn't look right.

One thing to note, I had some difficulty after installing the Natbib package, an error message would say that the author year syntax was wrong but after rerunning it a few times this disappeared. Might be unrelated but I thought I'd make you guys aware of it. Any ideas?

Clinker

It's a while since I needed to create a bibliography but I remember that I would always use BibTeX to create the bibliography, but then I would always take the contents of the *.bbl file and stick them in the original article in a "thebibliography" environment and tweak them until they were exactly as I wanted them. That way BibTeX did 95% of the work, but I wasn't tearing my hair out trying to persuade BibTeX to produce exactly what I wanted, which it never did. An admission of failure, perhaps, but an efficient way to work!

djpbarry

I think this is probably related to your style file (.bst). You could try using a different style file, or you could use makebst to define a custom style file.

Anonymous1987

Thanks for the suggestions, its probably related to the .bst file alright. Sounds like a lot of trouble to create a new one just for one thing so I'll just leave it. Thanks again.

djpbarry

makebst is actually relatively simple to use. Open command prompt, type 'latex makebst' and simply follow the instructions - you will be presented with a series of options for customising your .bst file with the default option presented in most cases. It's worth having a go - it will only take you a few minutes!

Anonymous1987

Thanks for the help. Unfortunately I have another problem, I pasted a reference into my Bibtex database and now I receive an error message: overfull hbox. I'm aware that this means that the text is so long it goes over the edge however this wasn't a problem until I added the new reference and when I removed the reference I get the error message for all my references. It also tries to break up words which really don't need to broken up e.g. jour-nal=The Quar-terly Jour-nal of Eco-nomics. Any ideas how I can fix this?

Time Magazine

Anonymous1987 wrote: »

Hi, I'm using Natbib for my referencing, American Economic Review (aer) style, however whenever an author is listed twice or more it just places an "_" instead of the authors name in the second and subsequent listings of the author

I promise you don't need to worry about this. Yes, the AER sometimes does not use the underscore approach, but sometimes it does. In any case, it's a common approach and it's fine. Trust me, when you've seen references that are MySpace or YouTube URLs without any explanatory text, underscored names are not going to bother you.

Anonymous1987 wrote: »

Thanks for the help. Unfortunately I have another problem, I pasted a reference into my Bibtex database and now I receive an error message: overfull hbox. I'm aware that this means that the text is so long it goes over the edge however this wasn't a problem until I added the new reference and when I removed the reference I get the error message for all my references. It also tries to break up words which really don't need to broken up e.g. jour-nal=The Quar-terly Jour-nal of Eco-nomics. Any ideas how I can fix this?

Sometimes it can help to delete the files that TeX creates (the .aux file, etc.) and then recreating them. I think sometimes that errors get "stuck" and you need to clear the system out a bit.

Also that bibliography entry sounds weird, what's the article?

Anonymous1987

Time Magazine wrote: »

Also that bibliography entry sounds weird, what's the article?

That's not the entry, it's the error message.

Time Magazine

Anonymous1987 wrote: »

That's not the entry, it's the error message.

Could you post up the entry as you have it in your .bib file (and the entries immediately before and after it) so we can check if there any errors in there?

Anonymous1987

I've been messing around with it since I posted that and I've pinned down the problem on this one article:

@TechReport{Pham2009,
author={Cong S. Pham and Mary E. Lovely and Devashish Mitra},
title={The Home-Market Effect and Bilateral Trade Patterns: A Reexamination of the Evidence},
year=2009,
month=Aug,
institution={Deakin University, Faculty of Business and Law, School of Accounting, Economics and Finance},
type={Economics Series},
url={http://ideas.repec.org/p/dkn/econwp/eco_2009_12.html},
number={2009_12},
abstract={},
keywords={}
}

When I take this reference out of the bib file, I still get error messages in the bib file but if I just hit enter a few times and \end it churns out the unedited bib references in pdf. Then I just run the TeX file as usual and the Bibliography is produced perfectly without errors. When I add this reference I receive a few extra errors in the bib file and new errors where there were previously none in the TeX file. The output in the Bibliography is fine except for this one reference as it appears formatted incorrectly with really wide spaces between the words for three lines and the final line is crammed together.

Time Magazine

@article{pham2009,
  title={{The Home-Market Effect and Bilateral Trade Patterns: A Reexamination of the Evidence}},
  author={Pham, C.S. and Lovely, M.E. and Mitra, D.},
  journal={Economics Series},
  year={2009},
  publisher={Deakin University, Faculty of Business and Law, School of Accounting, Economics and Finance}
}

is a perfectly acceptable reference and is less error prone.

Lol at her email address: Mary E. Lovely (melovely@maxwell.syr.edu)

Anonymous1987

Cheers, that did the job.