The standard LaTeX macro \cite
works well with numeric or
simple key citations. To deal with the more complex task of author-year
citations as used in many natural sciences, a variety of packages has
been developed which define derived forms of the \cite
macro.
RefTeX can be configured to produce these citation macros as well by
setting the variable reftex-cite-format
. For the most commonly
used LaTeX packages (natbib
, harvard
, chicago
,
jurabib
) and for ConTeXt this may be done from the menu, under
Ref->Citation Styles
. Since there are usually several macros to
create the citations, executing reftex-citation
(C-c [)
starts by prompting for the correct macro. For the Natbib style, this
looks like this:
SELECT A CITATION FORMAT [^M] \cite{%l} [t] \citet{%l} [T] \citet*{%l} [p] \citep{%l} [P] \citep*{%l} [e] \citep[e.g.][]{%l} [s] \citep[see][]{%l} [a] \citeauthor{%l} [A] \citeauthor*{%l} [y] \citeyear{%l}
If citation formats contain empty pairs of square brackets, RefTeX
will prompt for values of these optional arguments if you call the
reftex-citation
command with a C-u prefix.
Following the most generic of these packages, natbib
, the builtin
citation packages always accept the t key for a textual
citation (like: Jones et al. (1997) have shown...
) as well as
the p key for a parenthetical citation (like: As shown
earlier (Jones et al, 1997)
).
To make one of these styles the default, customize the variable
reftex-cite-format
or put into .emacs:
(setq reftex-cite-format 'natbib)
You can also use AUCTeX style files to automatically set the
citation style based on the usepackage
commands in a given
document. See Style Files, for information on how to set up the style
files correctly.