Identify this bibliographic style from example please?
January 23, 2018 8:18 AM   Subscribe

I have to submit an article to a small scholarly journal. They demand an unfamiliar (to me) style for listing references. I would strongly prefer to prepare the reference list using BibTex/LaTeX. Can you help me: A) identify the style (hoping/assuming it is semi-standard) and B) Find a style file (.bst) that will implement it? Examples and details follow.

Description and examples direct from (Wiley) journal are:

References should be cited in the text by author and (in parentheses) year of publication. References at the end of the manuscript should be arranged alphabetically by author and follow the style of these examples:

A. Brooke, D. Jendrick and A. Meeraus [1992], GAMS: A User’s Guide, Scientific Press, So. San Francisco, CA

R. Newall and W. Pizer [2003], Discounting and Uncertainty in Climate Change Policy Analysis, Land Econ. 79, 369-381.

Second paper is available here if that helps at all.

I have looked through several standard styles and none of them are even that close. I am hoping that if this has a name, then someone has already made a .bst file.

Any help is appreciated, including very similar-looking standard styles, or .bst's that produce similar output.

Comments confirming the dubious utility of this style, questioning the merits of avoiding the top 5 major bib styles, and the lack of explanation/support are also welcome.

(I know I can contact the journal office about this but I think AskMe will be faster and more pleasant :)
posted by SaltySalticid to Writing & Language (6 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
Some publishers have their own house styles. Wiley is one of these; they have a House Style Guide available as a PDF. They also have an author template available for LaTeX. You may want to confirm with the journal that they are using Wiley's house style and not their own style, though.
posted by halation at 8:23 AM on January 23, 2018


Response by poster: Thanks halation for the fast response! I wish it were so simple. I have published in a few other Wiley journals before, and none of them have used the bibstyle used in the linked Wiley author LaTeX template (perhaps because that is for Wiley books). That uses plainnat.bst, and produces output like this:

L. French and P. Pavlidis. Relationships between gene expression and brain wiring in the adult rodent brain. PLoS Computational Biology, e1001049:7, 2011.

That's not even that close, to my eye; year is in different place, italics are swapped, etc. It does alphabetize by last name of first author while printing last author's first initial first, so that's something.
posted by SaltySalticid at 8:35 AM on January 23, 2018


Yes, the template is specifically for Wiley books, I'm afraid I just noticed that. Far fewer resources on Wiley's journals prep page, frustratingly, though I did notice this line: "Note that some journals may not adhere to all aspects of the Wiley House Style, in which case please prepare your submission according to the specifications set out in the Author Guidelines of your chosen journal." So I think your specific journal may be one of the rogues :/
posted by halation at 8:53 AM on January 23, 2018


This looks like it's pretty close to the CSE Name-Year style, APA style or MLA. You could probably adapt this apa style bst to put the year in square brackets, but my LaTeX-fu is too weak these days to remember how hard that would be.
posted by dis_integration at 9:06 AM on January 23, 2018


Just to ask:

You've already submitted it as it stands and had it desk-rejected, or you have some real reason to expect that they really will desk-reject your paper if it doesn't follow their citation format? I mean, unless you're planning to publish there a *lot*, the most sensible thing to do here and now is just submit it as is and see whether they reject it or send it to reviewers. Yeah, you would have to set it up eventually when and if it's accepted, but dealing with the production crew for an accepted piece is very different from dealing with the editors about acceptance.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 10:37 AM on January 23, 2018


If there's no downloadable house style, you can search for citation styles here. You can then download the best-matching style for a range of different citation managers, or even edit or tweak it to make a custom style if it didn't quite match... though there's a bit of a learning curve, unfortunately.
posted by ubersturm at 11:12 AM on January 23, 2018 [2 favorites]


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