References style without line breaks.

Question

I'm writing a grant application and space is at a premium. I want LaTeX to print my references section without line breaks, so

References
 [1]
 [2]
 [3]

becomes

References
 [1], [2], [3]

I don't think the exact references style is too important (this is NSF), but I can't seem to find any bibliography style that will do this.

Answer 1

You could edit your bib style to remove the newlines which are output between each pair of \bibitems. That's going to be potentially... painful, and leave you with a bibliography which is pretty much write-only.

You might consider simply using smaller type for your references than for your main text---switching to \small can save you considerable space on its own.

Answer 2

Rob Hyndman recently posted about this very topic where his post coincidentally starts with:

I’ve been writing a grant application with a 10-page limit, and as usual it is difficult to squeeze everything in. No, I can’t just change the font as it has to be 12 point with at least 2 cm margins on an A4 page. Fortunately, LaTeX is packed full of powerful features that help in squeezing it all in. Here are some of the tips I’ve used over the years.

Edit: I should add that this doesn't answer your specific question about formatting via bst files -- but you may find a few other tips in the post.

As for one-off bst formatting, I too have done in the past but I consider it to be a hack.

Answer 3

I would definitely consider the advice from Dirk Eddelbuettel, first. However, reformatting the bibliography seems to be something of a black art, but there are two major methods for doing so: custom-bib and biblatex. Custom-bib operates by interrogating you as to the myriad features you might possibly want to use. I've tried to use custom-bib in the past with little success, but others have used it successfully.

Biblatex, however, uses latex commands directly within the document itself (or, style file) to generate the style. Internally, it divides each bib entry into blocks and units with settable punctuation between them (via \newblockpunct and \newunitpunct, respectively), and usually a block is an entire entry. It should be noted that biblatex is still in beta testing, so it may still have some quirks. Also, be sure to check the prerequisites for running it. As of this point, I have not used it, but if the documentation is at all accurate, I intend to.

Edit: I looked at the style file again, and it appears that biblatex is implementing the bibliography environment as a list. So, to achieve what you are looking for, you would use paralist instead. You may be able to renew thebibliography environment yourself without using biblatex, but you may have to dig through your bst file to figure out what formatting commands are used. The method with biblatex just seems easier.