"sort&compress" and "nocite" do not work for latex-pdf in rmarkdown-CodePudding

My pure-latex demo.tex is as follows:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage[hidelinks]{hyperref}
\usepackage[numbers,super,square,sort&compress]{natbib}

\begin{document}

statistics \cite{anderson2003introduction,efron2004least,hastie2009elements}

\bibliographystyle{unsrtnat}
\nocite{*}
\bibliography{ref}
\addcontentsline{toc}{section}{References}

\end{document}

and it works well, where ref.bib contains

@Book{anderson2003introduction,
  author    = {Anderson, Theodore Wilbur},
  publisher = {Wiley},
  title     = {An introduction to multivariate statistical analysis},
  year      = {2003},
  address   = {New Jersey},
  edition   = {3},
}
@Article{efron2004least,
  author    = {Efron, Bradley and Hastie, Trevor and Johnstone, Iain and Tibshirani, Robert},
  title     = {Least angle regression},
  journal   = {The Annals of Statistics},
  year      = {2004},
  volume    = {32},
  number    = {2},
  pages     = {407--499},
}
@Book{hastie2009elements,
  author    = {Hastie, Trevor and Tibshirani, Robert and Friedman, Jerome},
  publisher = {Springer},
  title     = {The elements of statistical learning: {Data} mining, inference, and prediction},
  year      = {2009},
  address   = {New York},
  edition   = {2},
}
@Book{fan2020statistical,
  author    = {Fan, Jianqing and Li, Runze and Zhang, Cun-Hui and Zou, Hui},
  publisher = {CRC},
  title     = {Statistical foundations of data science},
  year      = {2020},
  address   = {Boca Raton},
}

I want to translate demo.tex to the rmarkdown file tex2rmd.rmd and I try

---
output: 
  pdf_document:
    keep_tex: yes
    citation_package: natbib
natbiboptions: "numbers,super,square,sort&compress"
# natbiboptions: "numbers,super,square" #test
biblio-style: unsrtnat
nocite: '@*'
bibliography: ref.bib
link-citations: yes
colorlinks: no
---

statistics [@anderson2003introduction; @efron2004least; @hastie2009elements]

# References

which gives errors like

! Missing \endcsname inserted.
<to be read again> 
                   \&
l.351 \newcommand
                 \NAT@aysep{,} \newcommand\NAT@yrsep{,}

Then I check the tex2rmd.tex file from the keep_tex: yes functionality, and I find the problem happens at

\usepackage[numbers,super,square,sort\&compress]{natbib}

where there is sort\&compress instead of sort&compress. How can I fix this?

Moreover, I use natbiboptions: "numbers,super,square" instead for test purpose and find the nocite: '@*' does't work either (it should show all 4 items other than the cited 3 items). Do I ignore something?

CodePudding user response：

Replacing the & from sort&compress with , solves the issue of sort&compress.

And it seems the nocite YAML key doesn't work when you use natbib or biblatex as the citation package. Because nocite key is used by pandoc-citeproc filter, but when natbib or biblatex is used as citation method (default is

CodePudding user response：

To avoid all the problems with rmarkdown parsing and give you much more freedom, you can directly use the latex code in rmarkdown:

---
output: 
  pdf_document:
    keep_tex: yes
link-citations: yes
colorlinks: no
header-includes:
  - \usepackage[numbers,super,square,sort&compress]{natbib}
---

\nocite{*}

statistics \cite{anderson2003introduction,efron2004least,hastie2009elements}

# References

\bibliographystyle{unsrtnat}
\bibliography{ref}