Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
— section: Bibliographies and citations subsection: Creating citations date: 2014-06-10 —
# 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`](https://ctan.org/pkg/mcite)
and [`mciteplus`](https://ctan.org/pkg/mciteplus) packages deal with the problem.
[`mcite`](https://ctan.org/pkg/mcite) overloads the `\cite` command to recognise a
`*` at the start of a key, so that citations of the form
```latex
\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
```latex
\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`](https://ctan.org/pkg/mcite) package documentation tells you how to do that.
Most recent versions of [`REVTeX`](https://ctan.org/pkg/revtex4-1) (version 4.1 and later), in conjunction with recent versions of [`natbib`](https://ctan.org/pkg/natbib), already contain support for combined citations and so no longer even need [`mciteplus`](https://ctan.org/pkg/mciteplus) (but [`mciteplus`](https://ctan.org/pkg/mciteplus) is more general and will work with many other class and package combinations).
The [`mciteplus`](https://ctan.org/pkg/mciteplus) package adresses many of the infelicites of
[`mcite`](https://ctan.org/pkg/mcite). Again, ordinary `bst` files will not
work with [`mciteplus`](https://ctan.org/pkg/mciteplus), but the package documentation explains
how to patch an existing BibTeX style.
The [`collref`](https://ctan.org/pkg/collref) package takes a rather different approach to the problem, and will work with most (if not all) BibTeX packages. [`Collref`](https://ctan.org/pkg/Collref) spots common subsets of the references, so if it sees a sequence ```latex \cite{paper0,paper1,paper2,paper3} … \cite{some_other_paper,paper1,paper2,and_another} ``` it will collect `paper1` and `paper2` as a multiple reference.
