UPDATE: I learned how to use custom-bib's makebst. I've updated the spmpscinat.bst file in a more proper way by using makebst. I also regenerated the spmpsci.bst file so it properly reverses editor names to match the JMB format. I will submit these to JMB and hopefully they'll use them. FYI, these were mostly generated from spmpscinat.dbj and spmpsci.dbj, respectively.
I was frustrated to find out that the Journal of Mathematical Biology (JMB) has been using some outdated LaTeX support files. In particular, they distribute a BiBTeX style file that has no support for natbib use (or anything similar, like apacite). This appears to be less of a problem with JMB and more of a problem with Springer in general (i.e., most of its journals). They actually expect people to type the names of the authors that they reference directly (either that or use references (e.g., [2]) as nouns, which is bad style even though it saves space)! Can you believe that?
Civilized people use a package like natbib to do something like \citet{SK86} on every textual citation, which will then generate "Stephens and Krebs (1986)" (in Harvard mode) or "Stephens and Krebs [61]" (in numerical mode). There are lots of good reasons to do this. For one, it prevents me from accidentally turning "Krebs" into "Krbes".
To deal with this, I took the abbrvnat.bst style file packaged with natbib and hacked its support into the spmpsci.bst file from Springer. The result is spmpscinat.bst, which seems to work as desired for most bibliography entries I have tried.
I don't have a lot of experience with working with BiBTeX support files, so I have a feeling that it would have been better to use custom-bib to generate a BiBTeX style file in the JMB format that would be compatible with natbib. I may do that later.
So basically, I reserve the right to update or changed spmpscinat.bst at any time and without any notice, so look out for updates.
