Natural Sciences Citations and References (Author–Year and Numerical Schemes)

The natbib package is a reimplementation of the LTEX \cite command, to work with both author–year and numerical citations. It is compatible with the standard bibliographic style files, such as plain.bst, as well as with those for harvard, apalike, chicago, astron, authordate, and of course natbib. In contrast to the packages listed above, the natbib package supports not only the various author–year bibliography styles, but also those for standard numerical citations. In fact, it can also produce numerical citations even with an author–year bibliographic style, something that permits easy switching between the two citation modes. To this end, replacements for the standard LTEX .bst files are also provided. It is possible to define the citation style (type of brackets and punctuation between citations) and even to associate it with the name of the bibliographic style so that it is automatically activated. Citation styles can be defined for local .bst files by means of a configuration file natbib.cfg. It is compatible with the packages: babel, index, citeref, showkeys, chapterbib, hyperref, koma and with the classes amsbook and amsart. It can also emulate the sorting and compressing functions of the cite package as well as the multiple citation (and merging) functions of Thorsten Ohl’s mcite package. (The natbib package, however, is not compatible with either cite or mcite themselves.) Note that the citeref package (for adding citation page numbers in the bibliography) must be loaded after natbib. (The hyperref package with the option pagebackref also provides this feature, but with hyperlinks.) ∗The code for merged numerical bibliography entries, emulating the mcite package, has been commissioned by the American Physical Society and provided by Arthur Ogawa