Including hyperlinks for references makes reading of electronic versions
of papers much more efficient. However, these URLs are often printed
verbatim, which is a bit invasive, not quite useful and space
consuming.
A possibility is to anchor URL as \href
on titles or articles. However, these only works if the document is
produced with pdflatex or dvipdfm because
line breaking does not work with other drivers of
hyperref.
An alternative non invasive solution is to anchor URLs on labels of
entries in default bibtex modes, or adding a marginal small anchor
for natbib bibtex styles.
Our solution is to propose patched version of bibtex styles that prints
\biburl{URL} before the \bibitem entry instead
of including \url{URL} inside the
\bibitem.
By default this does nothing. However, we provide a package
biblabelurl.sty that redefines some of the
internal bibtex commands so as to print the reference with an
appropriate anchor.
Here are several bibtex styles for which we provide modified versions. (The pacth is just a few lines and can easily be reproduced manually to other style files).
| Original version | plainnat.bst | abbrvnat.bst | plain.bst |
| Biblabelurl version | plainnaturl.bst | abbrvnaturl.bst | plainurl.bst |
Two commands may be used to change the default behavior of the
biblabelurl package:
\BibLabelLinkOutertrue
may be used to put the hyperlink outside of the label typesetting
(such as additional brackets). By default, it is inside.
\BibDefaultLabel, which draws a default label
when none is there may redefined before loading the package or redefined
after to change its value.
foourl.bst
from the foo.bst versions.
The interest of this script is not only to applying under other source files
(under certain asumptions), but also to customize the output. In particular,
the script accepts an option --urllist that takes as argument an
ordered comma-separated list of bibtex fields and will produce use the first
of those field that is non empty for the url. This allows to store several
URLs such as the publisher, author, or project url in the bibtex database,
and decide which one take priority when generating the bibtex style.
Example:
makebiburlbst --urllist 'url,urlauthor,urlpublisher,urlproject' \
$(kpsewhich plainnat.bst) plainnaturl.bst