In this article I will report on my experience of creating a custom BibTeX style.

I had previously switch from BibTeX to biblatex and Biber because it offers more styles. However, for my MA dissertation, the style had to follow the Linguistic Society style, and I could not find the exact same style in the predefined option of biblatex.

Creating a custom style

I used the tool custom-bib. After downloading it and unzipping it, the only thing to do is to run the following commands:

latex makebst.ins
latex makebst.tex

The tool will then ask many questions about the desired style and it will create a .dbj file.

If the job to create the .bst is not run right at the end of the questions, run the following:

latex <dbjfile.dbj>

Using the newly created style

In my tex file, in the header I add (cf LaTeX Wikibook for details on natbib options)

\usepackage[round, comma]{natbib}

(instead of \usepackage[backend=biber,style=apa,natbib=true]{biblatex})

And at the end of my document, where I want my bibliography to appear, I add:

\bibliographystyle{MAling}
\bibliography{/home/<fullPathToBiblio>/bibliography.bib}

(instead of \printbibliography, where MAling is the bst file previously created and <fullPathToBiblio> is the full path to where my .bib file is located)

Citing references

To get the desired output in the text body, I used \citet which outputs "Author (year)" and a new command \ctp (for CiteT Parenthesis):

\newcommand{\ctp}[1]{(\citealt{#1})} % outputs "(Author year)"

Installing the style for further use

I have not tried this, since the style I created was a one time thing. But this might be useful for later. (source)

mkdir -p ~/texmf/bibtex/bst
cp mystyle.bst ~/texmf/bibtex/bst/
texhash ~/texmf # Make TeX aware of what you just did

Note on manually changing the bst

After all this I realised I need the year was in parenthesis where I actually wanted it to be without. So I looked into the bst file and searched for "(", but it did not seem to match. So I looked for the keyword year, which was surrounded by \harvardyearleft and \harvardyearright, I tried removing those and it worked.

Before:

  " \harvardyearleft " swap$ * "\harvardyearright{}" *

After:

  " " swap$ * "" *

It is clearly not perfect (there are colon instead of points, editors are not properly referenced), but it's a start!