I am using bookdown to generate a pdf book, and use a .bib file generated with mendeley. I use the natbib package with \setcitestyle{numbers,square} style. I call the references with [@reference].
I have quite a few references with species names in the title, something like this:
Incidence of mutator strains in Escherichia coli and coliforms in nature. Mutation Research Letters, 91(2):107–110, mar 1981
Where Escherichia coli is the species name. By default, it is not italicized. Initially, I tried to add <i>Escherichia coli</i> inside the reference title, but this does not seem to work when used in bookdown.
Is there any way to make sure that these names are italicized in the reference list?
\emph{Escherichia coli}should work, but I'm not sure if and where bookdown uses LaTeX (syntax) and whether the bibliography is passed through LaTeX or through some other tool like pandoc citeproc. – moewe Sep 04 '19 at 17:47rmarkdowntomarkdownviaknitr, then tolatexviapandoc, and then compiled with pdflatex. If that's the case, then you can follow this or this and just wrap the species name in either\textit{}or\emph{}. – Willie Wong Sep 04 '19 at 17:48\textit{}or\emph{}is simply rendered as text in the citation – Haakonkas Sep 04 '19 at 18:03