Simple LaTeX Hack for Very Condensed References

Nobody knows why some institutions still force you to compress references in order to fit on a page for proposals and the like. Some institutions have come around to excluding references in page limits, but for those that haven't, there is this repository.

Gallery

There are now two versions of xtrashort refs that you can use:

1. Numbered refs: This version will display your citations in the form [1].
2. Alphabetized refs: This version will display your citations in the form Last Name et al. (Year).

In each folder, you can look at xtrashort-refs-example.pdf to see how the references render.

Usage options

• Clone the repository, and test that it is working using python3 texcompile.py xtrashort-refs-example.

  • Note: the texcompile.py script is only working with the numbered refs version. The alphabetized version was rendered using pdflatex in Overleaf.

• Copy only the .bst file and relevant .sty files, then copy-paste relevant lines the .tex file into whatever latex you are already writing.

What we did, and how to hack our hack

Neither of us had any idea how to modify .bst files beforehand. For the numbered version, the main changes we made from the original apalike.bst were

• Rewrote the function format.names to display only the first author. BTW, it is easy to get the first, say, 5 authors; look for the line in format.names that says numnames %1 and simply change the 1 to a 5
• Removed titles for articles by just making all the strings empty in FUNCTION {format.title}
• Added FUNCTION {software} and made its title distinct from article-type titles so that it would be displayed. As a disclaimer, we have no idea how software is supposed to appear in APA guidelines.

This was a quick Friday afternoon hack at dotAstronomy 12.

For the alphabetized version, the changes are pretty much the same as above, but the format.names function was adjusted to display up to 3 authors (and the refs are no longer numbered).

How to contribute

Go ahead and do the typical contribution fork and PR workflow. Some known things that still don't work well are listed on the Issues page.

Disclaimer

This was intended as a quick hack example. We only tested it on our machines, with our Python versions and LaTeX distributions. Your mileage may vary.