Latex: Citations in section headings put into table of contents first

Question

I have some citations for sections of my document that I have put in the section heading:

\section{The title \cite{abc}, \cite{def}} Text

I am also using the table of contents function, but Latex must look at the citations in the headings (for the table of contents) first and assign them the first citation rankings, regardless of their place in the overall document.

So, any citations inside of \section or \subsection will be assigned [1], [2], and so on, and the citations within the text in the section follow after.

Has anyone encountered this problem before? Is there any way of getting around this other than simply putting the \cite command somewhere inside the paragraph? I'd like to avoid this if possible.

Cheers in advance!

Answer 1

You may perhaps not like this answer, but I think citations in headings is a bad style. I would rather recommend that you use another heading and then throw your citation references in the paragraphs following it. I've read quite some papers and none of those I recall used references in headings.

In the same vein, may I recommend using bibTex and bibtool for managing your bibliography database. Bibtool can normalize the citation keys so you can just drop other peoples bibtex references, run bibtool, and then you have standardized keys.

Answer 2

I ran into a similar problem when writing my thesis, but rather than being with headings it was citations embedded in figure captions. I got around the caption problem with the following:

\caption{main caption. taken from \cite{abc}}{main caption}

LaTeX takes the first argument for the figure caption, and the second argument for the caption that it puts in the list of figures. The lack of citations in the figure list means the ordering in the main body is correct.

I'm working from memory so the order of arguments above may be backwards. Regardless, see if headings can be defined in the same way.

Answer 3

I agree with jlouis' recommendation of avoiding citations in section headings. But if you insist, one solution may be to use the following form of the \section command:

\section[Section title sans citation]{Section title with citation\cite{key}}

The table of contents will contain an entry consisting of the first (optional) argument ("Section title sans citation") and the section heading itself will be the second (required) argument ("Section title with citation[34]").

The first (optional) argument will also be used as the text in the running heads by default.