March 17, 2008

Natbib: Multiple reference citation

By tom

Natbib is a reimplementation of the \cite command, providing both, author-year and numerical citations.You can get the distribution as well as the documentation from CTAN.Apparently, my previous post on this topic was not providing sufficient information in order to automatically create lists for multiple citations, e.g. [1,2,3, 5] -> [1-3, 5].Here is how it definitely works using “natbib”: First you include the package into your document with whatever options you prefer:

\usepackage[square, comma, sort&compress]{natbib}

Here, “sort&compress” provides the effect we are looking for, i.e. comma separation and hyphenation of multiple citations. By default, natbib uses round parentheses and colons, hence I changed them to square brackets and commas.Use

\citet{wikiEn}

for textual and

\citep{wikiEn}

for parenthetical citation, instead of \cite. The following example shows how Natbib replaces more than two consecutive citations by a hypen:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[square, comma, sort&compress]{natbib}
\begin{document}
\section{Comma separated citations}
Most popular search engines include Google and Yahoo, \citep{google, yahoo}.
\section{Citation list}
The most popular free online encyclopaedia is available in different languages, \citep{wikiEn, wikiDe, wikiFr}.
\bibliographystyle{plainnat}
\begin{thebibliography}{99}
\bibitem{google}http://www.google.com. Google Inc. search engine, 2008.
\bibitem{yahoo}http://www.yahoo.com. Yahoo! Inc. search engine, 2008.
\bibitem{wikiEn}http://en.wikipedia.org. Wikipedia in English, 2008.
\bibitem{wikiDe}http://de.wikipedia.org. Wikipedia in German, 2008.
\bibitem{wikiFr}http://fr.wikipedia.org. Wikipedia in French, 2008.
\end{thebibliography}
\end{document}

My apologies, I got something wrong here in the first place. Natbib is not a bibliography-style, but a package providing author-year and numerical citation. Natbib is supported by the following three styles:

plainnat.bst, abbrvnat.bst and unsrtnat.bst

which replace the standard bst-files.

(Source: http://merkel.zoneo.net/Latex/natbib.php)

Update

The code above doesn’t seem to work any longer. Here is the same code where natbib was replaced by cite (package documentation):

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{cite}
\begin{document}
\section{Comma separated citations}
Most popular search engines include Google and Yahoo, \cite{google, yahoo}.
\section{Citation list}
The most popular free online encyclopaedia is available in different languages, \cite{google, wikiEn, wikiDe, wikiFr}.
\bibliographystyle{plainnat}
\begin{thebibliography}{99}
\bibitem{google}http://www.google.com. Google Inc. search engine, 2008.
\bibitem{yahoo}http://www.yahoo.com. Yahoo! Inc. search engine, 2008.
\bibitem{wikiEn}http://en.wikipedia.org. Wikipedia in English, 2008.
\bibitem{wikiDe}http://de.wikipedia.org. Wikipedia in German, 2008.
\bibitem{wikiFr}http://fr.wikipedia.org. Wikipedia in French, 2008.
\end{thebibliography}
\end{document}

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 17th, 2008 at 11:10 pm and tagged with bibliography, bibliographystyle, citation, cite, citep, citet, LaTeX and posted in Bibtex & biblatex, Introduction, LaTeX, Package. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

29 Responses to “Natbib: Multiple reference citation”

satsuma
March 25th, 2008 at 9:47 pm

Thanks for the good info, this really helps. One thing that your posting does not cover though, and neither does any other site that I’ve found about natbib, is how to set page numbers for multiple citations.

What I mean is that sometimes it’s needed to have the citation like this: [2, p. 15 ; 4, p 181]

I am not experienced enough with LaTex to provide a work-around for this. If you have a clue on how to do this, please add it to your blog. Appreciate it. Thanks.

Reply
tom
March 26th, 2008 at 8:45 pm
Hi!

You are right, natbib cannot do it. But you can define your own citation-command as a work-around:
```
\newcommand{\mycite}[4]{[\citenum{#1}, #2; \citenum{#3}, #4]}
```
And now you can have multiple citations with page numbers as follows:
```
\mycite{bla91}{p. 15}{bla99}{p. 181}
```
Reply
satsuma
March 27th, 2008 at 6:18 pm

For some reason in my environment the natbib didn’t seem to have a command \citenum. All I got was an undefined control sequence error. But when I downloaded the natbib.sty and included in the directory where my tex files are, it is working.

Thanks for sharing that work-around.

Reply
satsuma
March 27th, 2008 at 7:16 pm

The problem with \citenum problem is that the version of natbib that came with LaTex is an old version from 2003. The new one I downloaded is from 2007.

Reply
Louic
April 16th, 2008 at 12:02 pm
Thanks for your website, it’s very informative.

I needed to download hypernat.sty and use
```
\usepackage{hypernat}
```
to get the sort&compress to work.

Apparently there is a conflict between hyperref and natbib, which is solved by using hypernat.

Happy TeX’ing
Reply
k
May 23rd, 2008 at 6:02 pm
I had to spend an hour with Google to find this one trivial command:
```
\nocite{key}
```
which puts a citation in your \bibliography, without showing up in the actual text (good for abstracts)
Reply
Pradeep
May 26th, 2008 at 8:05 am

Thanks a lot buddy.. How to use “square brackets” in natbib trick worked….

Reply
Eivind Uggedal
June 19th, 2008 at 10:25 am
satsuma: In my own thesis class I have to following to cite two sources with pages:
```
% Double page citation
\newcommand{\citedouble}[4]{%
  (\citealp[#1]{#2}; \citealp[#3]{#4})%
}
```
Reply
sohail
July 15th, 2008 at 10:43 am
Using natbib, for a single citation with page number and the text see e.g. I do
```
\citep[see e.g.][p.394]{efron1993ib}
```
and it generates

(see e.g. Efron and Tibshirani, 1993, p.394)

but I am unable to do the same for the multiple citation with page numbers and the text see e.g. like

(see e.g. Efron and Tibshirani, 1993, p.107; Chernick, 1999, p.84)
Reply
Naveen
April 17th, 2009 at 6:38 am

Thanks Tom!! That helped.

Reply
Courtney
July 3rd, 2009 at 6:25 pm
Thank you Louic!

For those using natbib and hyperref, it is required to use
```
\usepackage{hypernat}
```
to allow natbib to use sort&compress properly. Finding your post saved me many hours!
Reply
kezz
August 5th, 2009 at 3:38 pm

Thanks very much for this!

Reply
Mander
September 10th, 2009 at 6:09 pm

@sohail:

I get around that kind of problem with judicious use of \citealp, \citealt, etc. For instance:

There is some evidence of seasonal distribution of goods (\citealp[9]{freddie04transition}, see also \citealt{vicent97island}), as well as a strong suggestion blah blah blah

compiles as:

There is some evidence of seasonal distribution of goods (Freddie 2004:9, see also Vicent 1997), as well as a strong suggestion blah blah blah

Reply
Rachel
June 30th, 2010 at 7:53 pm

Thank you for this post. I found that after adding \usepackage[square, comma, sort&compress]{natbib}, I got the error “! Package natbib Error: Bibliography not compatible with author-year citations.” After searching on another forum (http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive/Comp/comp.text.tex/2009-03/msg00162.html) I found that the solution is to add the option “numbers” to your \usepackage command above; i.e. \usepackage[square, comma, sort&compress, numbers]{natbib}. Just thought I’d add this in case anyone else is experiencing the same difficulty.

Reply
- nelu
  March 20th, 2011 at 8:38 pm
  
  thanks rachel, it was very helpful
  
  Reply
- prathap
  March 31st, 2011 at 6:07 am
  
  Thanks Rachel, it helped !
  
  Reply
- Greg
  July 28th, 2011 at 1:34 am
  
  Thanks Rachel, that’s what I needed.
  
  Reply
Virag Shah
July 15th, 2011 at 11:26 pm

\usepackage{cite} …worked for me

Reply
Eve
August 8th, 2011 at 6:15 pm

Thanks for the great post! Also, thank you to Rachel – I had the same problem, and that fixed it!

Reply
rozita
April 19th, 2012 at 8:54 pm
hi every one
I am typing my thesis in latex and i got big problem, I need to seprate my all references with comma , i am using
```
\cite{citation40,citation41,citation59,citation97}
```
but i am getting instead of comma semicolon; for separating references {40;59;97} and whenever i am using
```
\cite{citation2}{,} \cite{citation3} {,} \cite{citation41}
```
i am getting comma but i am having extra [] such as : [2],[3],[41]

My goal is just [2,3,41] how i can get this???
please help, this is so urgent.
thanks.
Rozita
Reply
- tom
  April 20th, 2012 at 2:51 am
  Hi Rozita,
  
  Thanks for your comment. It suffices to load the natbib package. Here is a minimal example:
  
  \documentclass{article} \usepackage{natbib} \begin{filecontents}{bibtextest.bib} @book{knuth1979tex, title={TEX and METAFONT: New directions in typesetting}, author={Knuth, D.E.}, year={1979}, publisher={American Mathematical Society}} @book{knuth1986texbook, title={The texbook}, author={Knuth, D.E. and Bibby, D. and Makai, I.}, volume={1993}, year={1986}, publisher={Addison-Wesley}} @book{knuth1988tex, title={Tex}, author={Knuth, D.E. and Bibby, D.}, year={1988}, publisher={Addison Wesley Publ. Comp.}} \end{filecontents} \begin{document} See \cite{knuth1979tex, knuth1986texbook, knuth1988tex}. \bibliographystyle{plain} \bibliography{bibtextest} \end{document}
  
  You may also want to view the natbib reference sheet, a very nice collection of options provided by the package.
  
  Best, Tom.
  Reply
  - rozita
    April 26th, 2012 at 9:02 am
    
    Dear Tom,
    Thanks alot.
    Best Regards
  - tom
    April 26th, 2012 at 3:43 pm
    
    You are welcome. Happy to help. Tom.
Muatez
May 1st, 2012 at 7:35 pm

Hi Tom,
Could you please help me with that???
I want to write three references in the same box?
Thanks in advance

Reply
- tom
  May 2nd, 2012 at 4:06 pm
  Hi Muatez,
  
  It’s sufficient to use the natbib package with
  
  \cited{citation1, citation2, citation3}
  
  Best, Tom.
  Reply
Sham
July 1st, 2012 at 7:05 am

dear Tom,
how we can cite multiple references like [1-4] instead of [1,2,3,4]?

Reply
- tom
  July 4th, 2012 at 2:23 am
  
  Hi sham,
  
  Please see my update of the post above where natbib was replaced with cite. That should work.
  
  Best, Tom.
  
  Reply
azim
August 7th, 2012 at 9:15 pm

Thankyou dear Rachel..I face the same problem as you mention.Now it works…May God Bless you….

Reply
Norman
September 1st, 2012 at 10:49 am

This is a very good tip particularly to those fresh to the blogosphere.
Brief but very precise info Thanks for sharing this one.
A must read article!

Reply