te.bst: an author-date bibtex style

Martin J. Osborne

te.bst is a BibTeX style file that produces references in an author (year) style. (It is the house style of Theoretical Economics.) Journal articles, books, and contributions to collected volumes are formatted as follows:

Aliprantis, Charalambos D. and Kim C. Border (1994), Infinite Dimensional Analysis. Springer, Berlin.

Arrow, Kenneth J., Leonid Hurwicz, and Hirofumi Uzawa (1961), "Constraint qualifications in maximization problems." Naval Research Logistics Quarterly, 8, 175–191.

Maskin, Eric S. (1985), "The theory of implementation in Nash equilibrium: a survey." In Social Goals and Social Organization (Leonid Hurwicz, David Schmeidler, and Hugo Sonnenschein, eds.), 173–204, Cambridge University Press.

To get the style, click on this link. Save the resulting page as a file called te.bst in a suitable directory.

What is suitable? If you have an implementation of TeX that uses a standard directory structure, put the file in something like <base>\local\bibtex\bst\te, where base is your base directory for TeX (or perhaps your root directory). The directory local might alternatively be called locatexmf, and you can call the subdirectory of bst anything you like, and indeed may put the file directly in the bst directory if you wish.

If you don't have a directory like <base>\local\bibtex\bst, search for other files with the extension bst on your storage device, and put te.bst with them. If there is more than one directory containing such files, choose one that is associated with the implementation of TeX you are using and seems to be "local", rather than part of the main system. (System directories may be overwritten when you upgrade your version of TeX.)

After you have found a home for te.bst, you may need to refresh the filename database of your TeX system. For example, for MiKTeX, choose Settings -> General -> Refresh FNDB. For BaKoMa TeX, choose Options -> Directories -> Rebuild ls-R (no, I don't understand the logic behind that name, either).

You may like some features of the TE style, but may want to modify others. In principle you can do so by editing te.bst. According to the author of BibTeX, Oren Patashnik, the style files are written in a "postfix stack language". I am unable to locate on the web an original copy of Patashnik's documentation, but if you search for "designing bibtex styles oren patashnik" you'll get links to several copies. Patashnik writes in the documentation that "It's not too hard to figure out how [to write a BibTeX style file] by looking at the standard-style documentation". Maybe it's not hard for aficianados of postfix stack languages, but most homo sapiens will have a bit of trouble making more than trivial changes in an existing style, let alone writing a new style from scratch.

A better route is to use the custom-bib package, which creates a style for you based on your answers to a long list of questions.