UK TeX FAQ -- question 98

### Creating a bibliography style

It is possible to write your own: the standard bibliography styles are distributed in a commented form, and there is a description of the language (see BibTeX documentation). However, it must be admitted that the language in which BibTeX styles are written is pretty obscure, and one would not recommend anyone who's not a confident programmer to write their own, though minor changes to an existing style may be within the grasp of many.

If your style isn't too 'far out', you can probably generate it by using the facilities of the custom-bib bundle. This contains a file makebst.tex, which runs you through a text menu to produce a file of instructions, with which you can generate your own `.bst` file. This technique doesn't deal with entirely new styles of document (the present author needed "standards committee papers" and "ISO standards" for his dissertation; another commonly-required type is the Web page - see URLs in bibliographies).

`normalfontBibTeX documentation`
  biblio/bibtex/distribs/doc.tar.gz
`makebst.tex`
  Distributed with macros/latex/contrib/supported/custom-bib.tar.gz