[texhax] how to satisfy a high school English teacher

Christopher W. Ryan cryan at binghamton.edu
Wed Mar 15 17:43:17 CET 2006


My high-school-freshman son had to do a term paper, so I took the 
opportunity to introduce him to LaTeX, rather than use our customary 
OpenOffice.org.  He caught on fairly quickly.  To my eye, it looked like 
it helped him write better, because there were no cool fonts, etc, on 
the screen to distract him while he was writing.  He even agreed with me 
on that point.

We used BibTeX too, using author-date citations, natbib, and a .bst file 
we created with custom-bib.   Some of his references were anonymous 
encyclopedia articles.  For these, I entered "Anonymous" into the author 
field in the BibTeX file.  So the in-line citations for those ended up 
looking like "blah blah blah (Anonymous 1996)."  And the list of 
References looked like "Anonymous.  "The Soviet Revolution." blah 
Encyclopedia blah.  1996."

I thought that was the proper way to do it.  His teacher disagreed, 
prefering the title to appear, if there was no author:  "blah blah blah 
("The Soviet Revoultion")

I could get the list of References to start with title for those 
references with anonymous authors, just by leaving author {} field in 
BibTex file empty.  But then Latex/Bibtex put (Ano. 1996) for the 
in-line citation (which I also think is proper.)  But I could not get 
the title to appear for the in-line citation. (I suspect because this is 
not supposed to be done.)

Is there a way to make the title appear in the in-text citation, for 
anonymous references?

Eventually we just went back to (Anonymous 1996), which I think is the 
correct form anyway.

Thanks.

-- 
Christopher W. Ryan, MD
SUNY Upstate Medical University Clinical Campus at Binghamton
and Wilson Family Practice Residency, Johnson City, NY
cryanatbinghamtondotedu
GnuPG and PGP public keys available at http://pgp.mit.edu

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, 
divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the 
vast and endless sea."  [Antoine de St. Exupery]


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