UK TeX FAQ -- question label mcite

### Multiple citations

A convention sometimes used in physics journals is to “collapse” a group of related citations into a single entry in the bibliography. BibTeX, by default, can’t cope with this arrangement, but the mcite and mciteplus packages deal with the problem.

mcite overloads the `\``cite` command to recognise a “`*`” at the start of a key, so that citations of the form

>     \cite{paper1,*paper2}

appear in the document as a single citation, and appear arranged appropriately in the bibliography itself. You’re not limited to collapsing just two references. You can mix “collapsed” references with “ordinary” ones, as in

>     \cite{paper0,paper1,*paper2,paper3}

Which will appear in the document as 3 citations “[4,7,11]” (say) — citation ‘4’ will refer to paper 0, ‘7’ will refer to a combined entry for paper 1 and paper 2, and ‘11’ will refer to paper 3.

You need to make a small change to the bibliography style (`.bst`) file you use; the mcite package documentation tells you how to do that.

(Despite these multiple citations being primarily a physics-oriented requirement, the RevTeX (Physics support) class doesn’t work with mcite.

The mciteplus package adresses many of the infelicites of mcite, and does work with RevTeX. Again, ‘ordinary’ `.bst` files will not work with mciteplus, but the package documentation explains how to patch an existing BibTeX style.

The collref package takes a rather different approach to the problem, and will work with most (if not all) BibTeX packages. Collref spots common subsets of the references, so if it sees a sequence

>     \cite{paper0,paper1,paper2,paper3}
>     ...
>     \cite{some_other_paper,paper1,paper2,and_another}

it will collect `paper1` and `paper2` as a multiple reference.

`collref.sty`
  macros/latex/contrib/collref (or browse the directory)
`mcite.sty`
  macros/latex/contrib/mcite (or browse the directory)
`mciteplus.sty`
  macros/latex/contrib/mciteplus (or browse the directory)
`revtex bundle`
  macros/latex/contrib/revtex (or browse the directory)

This answer last edited: 2009-06-09

This question on the Web: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=mcite