/dev/jim>
liverpoolnat.bst
I recently started an MSc with Laureate Online / University of Liverpool. For completing written assignments I find gedit (using the gedit LaTeX Plugin) and LaTeX to be a lightweight combination that makes the most of my netbook's limited resources (The arrival of Gnome 3 has changed this a little and I now use Vim and the vim-latex plugin as discussed here). However, none of bibliography formats that I found quite matched the variant of 'harvard' used by Laureate so I modified Patrick W Daly's 'plainnat.bst' file to obtain the required formatting. The modified file is available for download here.
The following snippet illustrates the the use of the liverpoolnat.bst style;
\usepackage[hyphens]{url}
\usepackage[sort]{natbib}
\begin{document}
\setlength{\bibhang}{0em}
% Start of text
\cite{metcalfe1976} offer an insight into...
% end of text
\bibliography{bibliography}
\bibliographystyle{liverpoolnat}
\end{document}
The following illustrates a typical .bib entry and the corresponding bibliographic citation;
title={{Ethernet: Distributed packet switching for local computer networks}},
author={Metcalfe, R.M. and Boggs, D.R.},
journal={Communications of the ACM},
volume={19},
number={7},
pages={395--404},
year={1976},
publisher={ACM},
url={http://www.cs.umd.edu/usr/metcalfe76ethernet.pdf},
accessed={3rd July 2010}
}
Note the use of the (optional) 'accessed' parameter. If a url is supplied, the style file will look for the accessed tag and append a date to the bibliography in the form "(Accessed: 3rd July 2010)". If no url is supplied, the accessed tag is ignored.
Although I've not found any problems when using the file, there may be a couple of bugs lurking in there so use it at your own risk. If you find any bugs, please let let me know and I'll do my best to fix them (or better yet, send me the fixes.) Also, please let me know if you amend the .bst file so that I can reflect the changes here.
Download and Installation
The .bst style file may be downloaded here. The style file assumes that the Harvard style files are installed.
Ubuntu users may install the Harvard style files with the following command
This will create the directory '/usr/share/texmf-texlive/bibtex/bst/natbib'. Copy the file liverpoolnat.bst into this directory
Fedora users will probably find that the Harvard files are installed by default (I installed everything I needed with the single command 'yum install gedit-latex-plugin'), so may simply drop the file liverpoolnat.bst into the directory '/usr/share/texmf/bibtex/bst/natbib'.
On all systems, the Tex path information will need to be updated with the command;
If anyone can provide instructions on how to install .bst files on other systems, please let me know so that I can include details here.
Contact
My gpg public key is here.