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In this article, I will show the steps involved in creating a bibliography style file for the Journal Brain and include the relevant BST file for LaTeX, a powerful typesetting system available for all common platforms, including Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

It is important to realise that there are several different but equally important factors to consider when preparing a manuscript for publication. Readers are advised to read the “Information for Authors” pages as they will detail the requirements in detail. For the journal Brain, the requirements are listed very clearly.

The fundamental factors to consider are:

1. How to cite within the text
2. Where to cite in the text
3. How to format the reference list

How to cite within the text

This is not a function of the .bst file. However, the bst file does impact on citing within the text as citing requires bibtex to generate the correct data for use. In general terms, you should regard citation format within the text to be independent of bibliography style. The only time you will encounter problems is that if you use a bibliography style that uses numbered references and attempt to reference by author/date.

I use the natbib package to handle citation formatting. Brain requires Author Year citations, so read the natbib documentation and define the correct format in the \usepackage{} command.

Where to cite in the text

This is of considerable concern when switching an article from one journal style to another. If your paper is rejected from one journal, you may be faced with switching citation style, bibliography style and citation positioning.

For example:

Diabetes is very common. [1]

Diabetes is very common (Smith, 1994).

In LaTeX, you might write:
Diabetes is very common.\cite{Smith:1994}
Or
Diabetes is very common \cite{Smith:1994}.

Notice that we have to position punctuation correctly.

The easiest way of fixing this is to use regular expressions. My text editor of choice (TextMate) has powerful support for regular expressions. Using these, it is possible to search for citations with preceding punctuation
and replace them with citations that move the punctuation to the end. I shall save a more detailed description of this for another article.

Brain - journal of Neurology, Latex style file

I have created a style file for this journal. Please let me know if you have any difficulties with this and I hope you put it to good use. Credit really must go to the author of custom.bib (and indeed he is the author of natbib too) Patrick W Daly.

The Brain bibliography style file.

If you have problems with this style file, or want to make a minor change, then review the custom.bib log file that was used to create this style file. In it you will see the answers I made to the custom.bib questions.

Good luck!