Current status natbib and beamer

[oliviercailloux]

The current user manual does not mention natbib, although it has a section about bibliographies. I believe that an official indication about this natural combination (natbib and beamer) would be most welcome: is use of natbib with beamer unsupported, as indicated here, or discouraged but working, or supported, as perhaps suggested here? Apparently there is some work in beamer about supporting natbib, at least, so if it is meant to be used together with beamer, better state it clearly!

[samcarter]

You can use natbib with beamer, but beamer modifications, like little bibliography icons, changing the colour and formatting of the author, title etc. won't work out of the box.

\documentclass{beamer}

\usepackage{natbib}
\begin{filecontents*}[overwrite]{\jobname.bib}
@book{knuth,
  author       = {Knuth, Donald E.},
  title        = {The {\TeX} book},
  year         = 1984,
  maintitle    = {Computers \& Typesetting},
  volume       = {A},
  publisher    = {Addison-Wesley},
  location     = {Reading, Mass.},
  langid       = {english},
  langidopts   = {variant=american},
  sortyear     = {1984-1},
  sorttitle    = {Computers & Typesetting A},
  indexsorttitle= {The TeXbook},
  indextitle   = {\protect\TeX book, The},
  shorttitle   = {\TeX book}
}
\end{filecontents*}

\begin{document}

\begin{frame}
  \citet{knuth}
  
  \bibliographystyle{plainnat}
  \bibliography{\jobname}
\end{frame}

\end{document}

Personally I would use biblatex. It is the easiest to customise and very powerful. Normally the main contradiction to biblatex are journals, who might not accept it, but that's usually not a problem for presentations.