How to change separators in BibTex?

Question

According to the rules of my university, if an article from some journal was used, it should be separated with //.

Example: Lyness J. N. and Jespersen D. Moderate degree symmetric quadrature rules for the triangle//J. Inst. Math. Appl.

How should I do this? Do I have to change something in *.bst file?

You mean, there should be a line break between the article's name and the journal name? Which bibliography style do you employ? — Mico, Jun 01 '14 at 11:10
Not a line break. These two symbols must be. I use plain.bst — Тимофей Ломоносов, Jun 01 '14 at 11:15
Thanks for this clarification. And the only place where this unusual block divider is to be used is between the title and journal fields -- and nowhere else? — Mico, Jun 01 '14 at 11:17
\begin{rant} Wouldn't it be easier adopting a standard? \end{rant} You have all my sympathy. ;-) — egreg, Jun 01 '14 at 12:13

score 6 · Accepted Answer · 2014-06-01T11:53:36.910

I think that you need to hack plain.bst. Replacing the article function in plain.bst with the following seems to do the trick:

FUNCTION {article}
{ output.bibitem
  format.authors "author" output.check
  new.block
  format.title "title" output.check
  %new.block
  "//" *
  crossref missing$
    { journal emphasize *
      format.vol.num.pages output
      format.date "year" output.check
    }
    { format.article.crossref output.nonnull
      format.pages output
    }
  if$
  new.block
  note output
  fin.entry
}

Personally, I find the bst syntax to be quite painful, but you can read all about it in Patashnik's Designing BibteX files.

All that I have done above is to comment out the new.block line, added "\\" * to put your slashes after the title and then hacked the output of the journal's name so that no punctuation is added. I am sure that there are better ways to do this...

Thank you. I used *.bst change for something else found in this forum, so it's good both changes occur in the same place. — Тимофей Ломоносов, Jun 01 '14 at 11:56

score 1 · Answer 2 · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:35

The dirty hack

This doesn't involve changing any .bst files, but will most certainly mess with the rest of your bibliography. If we look at the .bbl file created by bibtex we find

\newblock {\em The Journal of Narrative Technique}, ...

Hence we could redefine \em to expand to // em.

% arara: pdflatex
% arara: bibtex
% arara: pdflatex
% arara: pdflatex
\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
\cite{doody}
{\em Emphasized text}
\let\oldem=\em % save \em
\def\em{//\space\oldem}
\bibliographystyle{plain}
\bibliography{biblatex-examples.bib}
\let\em=\oldem % restore \em
{\em Emphasized text}
\end{document}

Using `biblatex`

With biblatex everything is easier. We use

\renewbibmacro{in:}{...}

to suppress "In:" before the journal title and

\DeclareFieldFormat[article]{journaltitle}{// \emph{#1}}

to get the two slashes.

% arara: pdflatex
% arara: biber
% arara: pdflatex
% arara: pdflatex
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{biblatex}
\renewbibmacro{in:}{\ifentrytype{article}{}{\printtext{\bibstring{in}\intitlepunct}}}
\DeclareFieldFormat[article]{journaltitle}{// \emph{#1}}
\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}
\begin{document}
\cite{doody}
\printbibliography
\end{document}

(biblatex displays more fields than bibtex by default.)

How to change separators in BibTex?

2 Answers2

The dirty hack

Using biblatex

Using `biblatex`