Formatting citations

For citations, the Variants LaTeX template uses the natbib package. The following describes the most imporant choices we have made within the paradigm of that package.

Bibliography

1. Make a separate BibTeX bibiography for each article, and place the .bib file inside /references/.
2. Add the line \bibliography{references/subacius} right before /end{paper} in the article's .tex file.

For example, \bibliography{references/martinez} will fetch the bibliography (of cited[!] works) from /references/martinez.bib.

NOTE: be aware that sources not quoted in the text will not show up in the bibliography. If the author's bibliography contains sources that are not cited in the text, the question can be asked if should need to be added to the bibliography. A list of relevant but unquoted scholarly editions (for example) may be moved to an annex instead.

NOTE: sometimes, however, sources are referenced in the text without a full in-text citation (e.g. only an author's name and/or the year of the publication is referenced in the text. In that case, using \citeyear{KEY} or \citeauthor{KEY} would respectively print the (linked) YEAR or AUTHOR of a source. For example:

In citeyear{martinez_refining_2019}, Martinez et al. argued that [...].

would produce:

In 2019, Martinez et al. argued that [...]

and also include the reference in the bibliography.

Block Quotes

Block quotes use the following embedded environment structure:

\begin{quote}

The Multi-Line quotation.

\begin{flushright}
\citep[PAGENR]{KEY}
\end{flushright}

\end{quote}

Block Quotes as Figures

Sometimes you want to treat a block quote like a figure. For example when you want to prevent it from spilling over to the next page, and/or when you want to be able to give it a \caption{}. A use case here would be, for example, when you're quoting an entire poem. In those cases, you can just wrap a \begin{figure} and \end{figure} around your quote:

\begin{figure}
\begin{quote}

The Poem.

\begin{flushright}
\citep[PAGENR]{KEY}
\end{flushright}

\end{quote}
\caption
\end{figure}

This will preserve all of the regular block quote formatting, while preventing the quote from breaking up and bleeding into the next page.

Note:

You should be aware, however, this approach may bring up new issues with any footnotes you might want to attach to your quote. For more information on how to deal with footnotes inside a figure or table, check out the guidelines for Basic Formatting.

Regular In-Text Citations

In most cases, \citep[note][pagenr]{KEY} for in-text citation inside parentheses).

For example (given a matching BibTeX key pair), \citep[see][42]{martinez_refining_2019} would produce:

(see Martinez et al. 2019, 42)

In this command, the two arguments in between [square brackets] are optional.

When we want to reference a page range, rather than a single page, we can use a dash to do so. Variants uses an `m-dash' to span the page range, which could for example look like this:

\citep[20--22]{zeller_record_1995}

Of course, you can use single dashes too, according to your own preferences: the most important thing will be to choose one method and be consistent throughout your publication. To double-check that everyone has encoded these range markers in the same way, you can use the following RegEx expression to find all occurrences of ranged in-text references:

cite.*[0-9]-

In-Text Citations without Parentheses

Sometimes, we need to use in-text citations without parentheses -- e.g. in footnotes. For this, it's best to use \citealt{KEY} (as the default citet{KEY} places parentheses arount the YEAR -- which we do not want in Variants.

For example, \citealt{martinez_refining_2019} would produce:

Martines et al. 2019.

BibTeX and Diacritics

It is good realize that BibTeX treats all letters with diacrits as special characters. This means that when an author's name starts with a letter with a diacritic, it will put that bibliographic entry at the end of the (alphabetically ordered) \bibliography{} section. For example, a reference work by the author Viktorija Šeina will appear after an entry by Hans Zeller -- rather than among the S-entries, where it belongs (in alphabetised English-language lists, in any case).

To solve this issue, you can replace the relevant character(s) with codes in the .bib file. For example, when you change:

@article{
author = {Šeina, Viktorija},
}

into:

@article{	
author = {{\v S}eina, Viktorija},
}

this will treat the first letter as an S rather than as a special character. It is probably good practice to replace all diacritic signs in your .bib files, but that is a whole lot of work, so I recommend only doing this where it causes issues.

As the example shows, the special character is replaced by a stripped down version of that letter, preceded by a code for the diacritic, in between curly brackets. For more examples of codes for diacritics, see this StackOverflow thread.