4.2 Citation Styles ¶

The standard LaTeX macro \cite works well with numeric or simple key citations. To deal with the more complex task of author-year citations as used in many natural sciences, a variety of packages has been developed which define derived forms of the \cite macro. RefTeX can be configured to produce these citation macros as well by setting the variable reftex-cite-format. For the most commonly used LaTeX packages (biblatex, natbib, harvard, chicago, jurabib) and for ConTeXt this may be done from the menu, under Ref->Citation Styles. Since there are usually several macros to create the citations, executing reftex-citation (C-c [) starts by prompting for the correct macro. For the Natbib style, this looks like this:

SELECT A CITATION FORMAT
[^M] \cite{%l}
[t] \citet{%l}
[T] \citet*{%l}
[p] \citep{%l}
[P] \citep*{%l}
[e] \citep[e.g.][]{%l}
[s] \citep[see][]{%l}
[a] \citeauthor{%l}
[A] \citeauthor*{%l}
[y] \citeyear{%l}

And for the Biblatex style, it looks like this:

SELECT A CITATION FORMAT
[^M] \cite[][]{%l}
[C] \cite*[][]{%l}
[t] \textcite[][]{%l}
[T] \textcite*[][]{%l}
[p] \parencite[][]{%l}
[P] \parencite*[][]{%l}
[f] \footcite[][]{%l}
[s] \smartcite[][]{%l}
[u] \autocite[][]{%l}
[U] \autocite*[][]{%l}
[a] \citeauthor{%l}
[A] \citeauthor*{%l}
[i] \citetitle{%l}
[I] \citetitle*{%l}
[y] \citeyear{%l}
[Y] \citeyear*{%l}
[n] \nocite{%l}

If citation formats contain empty pairs of square brackets, RefTeX will prompt for values of these optional arguments if you call the reftex-citation command with a C-u prefix. Following the most generic of these packages, natbib, the builtin citation packages always accept the t key for a textual citation (like: Jones et al. (1997) have shown...) as well as the p key for a parenthetical citation (like: As shown earlier (Jones et al, 1997)).

To make one of these styles the default, customize the variable reftex-cite-format or put into .emacs:

(setq reftex-cite-format 'natbib)

Or this if you prefer the biblatex package:

(setq reftex-cite-format 'biblatex)

You can also use AUCTeX style files to automatically set the citation style based on the usepackage commands in a given document. See Style Files, for information on how to set up the style files correctly.

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