Natbib Basics
natbib extends the citation capabilities of BibTeX and offers a variety of flexible options for citation style, especially about parenthetical and narrative in-text citations.
Although BibLaTeX is considered a more robust and modern option (which we recommend using), natbib remains a widely used and efficient choice for managing citations in LaTeX documents. For this reason, we would like to give you a brief introduction here if you would want to use CiteDrive in conjunction with natbib and BibTeX: Include natbib Package: Add the natbib package to your LaTeX document by including the following line in the preamble:
\usepackage{natbib}Specify the citation style using \bibliographystyle{}. Common styles include plain, apalike, and abbrvnat. Place this command in the preamble as well:
\bibliographystyle{plain}Insert citations in the document using \cite{}, or in our example \citep{} and \citet{}. For multiple citations, separate them with commas:
% Parenthetical citation
\citep{author1_year1}. Another example \citep{author2_year2}.
% Textual citationAs mentioned by \citet{author1_year1}, the topic is important.\citet{author2_year2} also contributed valuable insights.At the end of your document, declare the bibliography, the .bib-file, which you may have created and exported from CiteDrive:
% bibliography.bib, without the `.bib` extension:\bibliography{bibliography}Compile your document in the following order to ensure proper citation and bibliography generation. The following should work:
pdflatex main.texBibTeX mainpdflatex main.texpdflatex main.texBibliography and Citation styles for Natbib
| Full Name | BST Name | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Author-Year (Default) | plainnat | Displays author name and publication year in the citation. |
| Numeric | numbers | Assigns a unique number to each citation in the order of appearance. |
| Author-Title | abbrvnat | Shows author name and the title of the work in the citation. |
| Chicago | chicago | After the Chicago Manual of Style for citations. |
| APA (American Psychological Assoc.) | apalike | Adheres to the guidelines of the APA style for citations. |
| Harvard | harvard | Similar to the author-year style, commonly used in Harvard referencing. |
| Nature | nature | Designed for citations in the style commonly used in scientific articles. |
| Vancouver | vancouver | Numeric citation style widely used in scientific and medical publications. |
| ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) | acm | Commonly used in computer science literature. |
| IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) | IEEEtran | Citation style specified by the IEEE for technical documents. |
Citation style options:
| Citation Command | Description |
|---|---|
\citet*{key} | Similar to \citet, but displays all authors in every citation. |
\citepauthor{key} | Prints only the author name(s) in parentheses. |
\citeyearpar{key} | Parenthetical citation format, but only the publication year is enclosed in parentheses. |
\citefullauthor{key} | Prints the full list of authors. |
\citetext{key} | Inserts a citation without parentheses. |
\citealtalias{key} | Alias for \citealt. |
\citealpalias{key} | Alias for \citealp. |
\citepalias{key} | Alias for \citep. |
\citenum{key} | Prints the citation number only. |
\citeauthorpar{key} | Parenthetical citation format, with only the author name(s) in parentheses. |
\citeyearalias{key} | Alias for \citeyear. |