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### 4.2 Citation Styles

The standard LaTeX macro `\cite` works well with numeric or simple key citations. To deal with the more complex task of author-year citations as used in many natural sciences, a variety of packages has been developed which define derived forms of the `\cite` macro. RefTeX can be configured to produce these citation macros as well by setting the variable `reftex-cite-format`. For the most commonly used LaTeX packages (`natbib`, `harvard`, `chicago`, `jurabib`) and for ConTeXt this may be done from the menu, under `Ref->Citation Styles`. Since there are usually several macros to create the citations, executing `reftex-citation` (`C-c [`) starts by prompting for the correct macro. For the Natbib style, this looks like this:

    SELECT A CITATION FORMAT

    [^M]   \cite{%l}
    [t]    \citet{%l}
    [T]    \citet*{%l}
    [p]    \citep{%l}
    [P]    \citep*{%l}
    [e]    \citep[e.g.][]{%l}
    [s]    \citep[see][]{%l}
    [a]    \citeauthor{%l}
    [A]    \citeauthor*{%l}
    [y]    \citeyear{%l}

If citation formats contain empty pairs of square brackets, RefTeX will prompt for values of these optional arguments if you call the `reftex-citation` command with a `C-u` prefix. Following the most generic of these packages, `natbib`, the builtin citation packages always accept the `t` key for a textual citation (like: `Jones et al. (1997) have shown...`) as well as the `p` key for a parenthetical citation (like: `As shown earlier (Jones et al, 1997)`).

To make one of these styles the default, customize the variable `reftex-cite-format` or put into `.emacs`:

    (setq reftex-cite-format 'natbib)

You can also use AUCTeX style files to automatically set the citation style based on the `usepackage` commands in a given document. See Style Files, for information on how to set up the style files correctly.

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