An issue about the single quote mark appeared in bibliography using `natbib` with `agsm` style

Question

I have settled on natbib with agsm style. And have a problem similar to the ones in the postings Removing the quotations marks from the bibliography using harvard style (agsm) and Fine tuning natbib for agsm bibliography style, and adding links. You can have a look at the answers given for these posts. That is, changing the agsm.bst file does work for the article form. After changing the agsm.bst file according to the answers, I do not have any single quote mark anymore on my bibliography for articles. But for the @inproceedings, I still have the single quote mark around the booktitle field. It looks like, for example:

Herman, G. (1974), Reconstruction of binary patterns from a few projections, in ‘International Computing Symposium 1973’, North-Holland Publ. Co., Amsterdam, pp. 371–378.

You can see the single quote marks.

I looked at the agsm.bst file of the proceedings part but I don't know which part to change. Can anyone help me with this? Thanks in advance!

You can try this as sss.tex:

\documentclass[]{article}
\usepackage{natbib}

\bibliographystyle{agsm}
\begin{document}

\title{Title}
\author{Author}
\date{Today}
\maketitle

\citep{sss}
\bibliography{sss}
\end{document}

and this is my sss.bib:

@inproceedings{sss,
author = "G. Herman",
title = "Reconstruction of binary patterns from a few projections",
booktitle = "International Computing Symposium 1973",
publisher = "North-Holland Publ. Co.", 
address = "Amsterdam",
pages = "371-378",
year = "1973"
}

How can I get rid of the single quote mark around 'International Computing Symposium 1973' in the References section?

Answer 1

For the case at hand, you'll need to edit the function format.in.ed.booktitle, in a copy of agsm.bst. I take it you've already applied some modifications, as referred to in the two earlier postings you've cross-referenced; let's assume the modified style file is called agsm-mod.bst. (Don't edit a file from the TeX distribution directly.) Now, proceed as follows:

• Open the file agsm-mod.bst in a text editor; the editor you use for your tex files will do fine.

• Locate the function format.in.ed.booktitle (it should start around l. 393).

• In this function, locate the following two lines:

      { "{\em in} " booktitle quote * }
      { "{\em in} " format.editors.reverse * ", " * booktitle quote * }
  

  Delete the word quote in both lines. They should thus now read as follows:

      { "{\em in} " booktitle * }
      { "{\em in} " format.editors.reverse * ", " * booktitle * }
  

• Save the file agsm-mod.bst either in the directory where your main tex file is located or in a directory that's searched by your TeX distribution. If you choose the second option, be sure to update the filename database of your TeX distribution as well.

• Start using the new style file by providing the instruction \bibliographystyle{agsm-mod}. Be sure to rerun LaTeX, BibTeX, and LaTeX twice more to fully propagate all changes.

Happy BibTeXing!

Incidentally, because the agsm file is part of the harvard package, you should load the har2nat package instead of natbib. har2nat loads natbib and provides some additional macros that improve the interoperability of agsm with the hyperref package.

\RequirePackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents}{sss.bib}
@inproceedings{sss,
author = "G. Herman",
title = "Reconstruction of binary patterns from a few projections",
booktitle = "International Computing Symposium 1973",
publisher = "North-Holland Publ.\ Co.", 
address = "Amsterdam",
pages = "371-378",
year = "1973"
}
\end{filecontents}

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{har2nat}
\bibliographystyle{agsm-mod}

\begin{document}
\citep{sss}
\bibliography{sss}
\end{document}