natbib-compatible BibTeX style (BST) file for Springer LNCS publications

For some reason, the folks over at Springer do not like to make their BibTeX style (BST) files natbib compatible. This omission seems egregious when considering the kind of authors that would submit to journals and conferences that use LNCS-style formatting. Springer does provide LaTeX support files for LNCS, but the included BST file is not natbib compatible (because it was not built with natbib and author–year extensions turned on, which are needed in natbib even when numbered references are used). What makes things more difficult is that it is produced by hacking another BST (titto.bst) that was originally generated properly using makebst, and many of the hacks were already implemented natively in merlin.mbs. So much more of the postfix BST language was hacked directly rather than would have been necessary if the correct docstrip driver options were picked in the first place. So that makes it more challenging to reproduce a refactored version with additional natbib functionality without worrying about introducing regressions.

Nevertheless, I've done my best, and I've made the the natbib-compatible result splncsnat.bst available for download. I was able to remove the need for some of the manual editing by a smarter choice of docstrip options, but I still ended up having to create a patch on top of a stock docstrip-generated BST (the docstrip driver splncsnat-unpatched.dbj and patch splncsnat.patch are also available). Hopefully that helps someone out there.

• splncsnat.bst: natbib-compatible BST file for Springer LNCS-type publications

  Download and place splncsnat.bst in same directory as document's TeX source code. In the TeX preamble of the document, use

  \usepackage[numbers]{natbib}
  \bibliographystyle{splncsnat}

  and then in the text use macros like

  \cite{smith77}       % to get a "[1]" in the text
  \citep{smith77}      % to get a "[1]" in the text
  \citet{smith77}      % to get a "Smith [1]" in the text
  \citeauthor{smith77} % to get a "Smith" in the text

  The normal \bibliography{FILENAME} can be used at the end of the text where the BBL will be inserted by BibTeX.

• splncsnat-unpatched.dbj: docstrip driver used to generate splncsnat-unpatched.bst
• splncsnat.patch: patch used to generate splncsnat.bst from splncsnat-unpatched.bst (assuming version 4.20 [2007/04/24 (PWD, AO, DPC)] of merlin.mbs)

Of course, you need only splncsnat.bst to get up and running.