[Glastonbury] Linux bibliography managers

[Ian Dickinson]

Hi Martin,
Thanks for the comments.

You wrote: 
> Don't know of any 'managers' per se 
OK, so a quick summary of what ProCite (the biblio
manager I use on Windows) does:

* provides a pre-formatted DB with columns for all of
the many fields associated with academic
bibliographies

* provides a form-based interface for adding new
entries, searching, forming sub-collections, importing
bibliographies from other collections and finding and
handling duplicates

* allows you to insert a reference in text like:

[wheeler docbook 2004]

then on demand will search the DB, find a match, allow
you to pick one if there are > 1, insert a reference
to the bibliography and build the bibliography at the
end of the document, so the above text might turn into

[27]  or
(Wheeler2004)

depending on style

* sorts the bibliography into alphabetical order,
citation order or document order as required

* provides reference style sheets matching the a
number of publishers (Nature, IEEE, etc) and allow you
to modify/create your own

There's none of this that I *couldn't* do with MySQL
and Perl, if I could be bothered, but I was wondering
if there were any packages that already had some or
all of these features.

> I find the learning curve involved in getting to
> grips with a specialised 
> package of that nature not worth the bother though,
I find ProCite pretty much indispensable - my
collection of citable references is pretty small
(about 500) and generally I cite about 30 of them at a
time. But still, I'd find it a right pain to keep
updating the references manually each time I made an
edit.

> There are two ways to set up a bibliography in
> DocBook: you can have the data raw or cooked. Here's
> an example of a raw bibliographical item, wrapped in
> the Biblioentry element:
> 
> <biblioentry xreflabel="Kites75">
> [snip]

> The "raw" data in a Biblioentry is comprehensive to
> a fault - there are enough fields to suit a host of
> different bibliographical styles, and that is the
> point. An abundance of data requires processing
> applications to select, punctuate, order, and format
> the bibliographical data, and it is unlikely that
> all the information provided will actually be
> output.
> 
> <bibliomixed>
> [snip]

> Clearly, these two ways of marking up
> bibliographical entries are suited to different
> circumstances. You should use one or the other for
> your bibliography, not both. Strictly speaking,
> mingling the raw and the cooked may be
> \u201ckosher\u201d as far as the DTD is concerned,
> but it will almost certainly cause problems for most
> processing applications.

OK, so this is pretty interesting. Thanks for the
reference. How much support is there in the various
docbook processors and editors for these different
styles? For example, how would a biblioentry or a
bibliomixed get turned into a pair like

As Smith [20] states ...
.
.

20. Smith, J. "Tao of Fubar" 2004


Thanks,
Ian



		
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