# BibTeX/LaTex question--Can I do this? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [June 15, 2010, 3:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bibtex-latex-question-can-i-do-this/543251 "2010-06-15T03:11:01Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![statsman1982](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e79b87/32.png) [@statsman1982](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/statsman1982)\ **Post date:** [June 15, 2010, 3:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bibtex-latex-question-can-i-do-this/543251/1 "2010-06-15T03:11:01Z")
I’ve been using Scientific Word (basically a GUI front-end) to create a LaTeX document and implementing BibTeX. So far, I am able to insert citations and a bibliography. But, I’ve run into what I think is a big limitation of BibTeX with in-text citations, unless I’m missing something obvious, which is entirely possible, if not probable, since I just learned about BibTeX this weekend. What I’d like to do is to be able to use citations both as nouns in the sentences and as end-of-sentence references. Here’s an example of what I’d like to do (content is entirely made up on the fly just to illustrate the form, so be gentle 🙂 ) > [@](#): > > To many people, the sky appears to be blue (Jones & Smith, 1999). However, Anderson (2002) contends that it is a mistake to regard “the sky” as having any color. Brown and Cooper (1985) give several examples of this type of pedantry… The problem is, I cannot see how to alter the form of the in-text citations depending on how the reference is used. BibTeX works great if all references take the form of sentence 1 above (i.e., they’re all at the end of the sentence). But using references as nouns is fairly common, right? So it seems there should be a way to alter the appearance of citations “on the fly.” The other option is to create a manual bibliography, but then, the time savings of BibTeX are lost. Or, I could use Word 2007 with the [Zotero](http://www.zotero.org/)Firefox plugin. I can alter the appearance of in-text citations and still have it generate a bibliography correctly, but writing math in Word 2007 sucks:smack:. Any hope of being able to do what I want here? ---
**Author:** ![sundog66](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ee7513/32.png) [@sundog66](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sundog66)\ **Post date:** [June 15, 2010, 3:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bibtex-latex-question-can-i-do-this/543251/2 "2010-06-15T03:32:53Z")
It sounds like you just want to be able to have citations of the form “(Author, Year)” as well as of the form “Author (Year)”. These, as well as other formats, should be easy to implement using Natbib. See here: [http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Bibliography\_Management#Natbib](http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Bibliography_Management#Natbib) ---
**Author:** ![scr4](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/59ef9b/32.png) [@scr4](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/scr4)\ **Post date:** [June 15, 2010, 3:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bibtex-latex-question-can-i-do-this/543251/3 "2010-06-15T03:35:46Z")
If I understood your question correctly, the [natbib](http://merkel.zoneo.net/Latex/natbib.php) package does exactly what you want. The **\citep** command works for your first example, and **\citet** lets you use textual citations like your second and third sentence. ---
**Author:** ![statsman1982](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e79b87/32.png) [@statsman1982](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/statsman1982)\ **Post date:** [June 15, 2010, 2:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bibtex-latex-question-can-i-do-this/543251/4 "2010-06-15T14:21:38Z")
That looks like exactly what I want, Thanks! I’ll give it a try.