### 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 package deals with the problem.

The package 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.

Unfortunately, the revtex system doesn’t play with mcite. As a result, for that (primarily physics-targeted system) you need to play silly games like:

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

and then edit the `.bbl` file to merge the two citations, to achieve the effects of mcite.

`mcite.sty`
  macros/latex/contrib/mcite (gzipped tar, browse)
`revtex bundle`
  macros/latex/contrib/revtex (gzipped tar, browse)

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