Notes and Hints on using BibTeX Bibliographies

W B Langdon . 23 February 2003 (19 Sep 06)

Other Information on Bibliographies

• Dana Jacobsen's Survey of Bibliography Software. In addition to the survey there are links to various tools to convert to BibTeX format and on line bibliographies.
• Tools for Manipulating BibTeX Bibliographies. This data is maintained on several sites world wide. This link is my local one, you may find another site is better for you. Tools include r2b (Refer/Tib bibliographies to BibTeX), bibtex2refer, bibindex, biblook, bibmerge and bibclean which tidies BibTeX files and can also convert from Scribe to BibTeX. (See the tools subdirectory for more on bibclean). Mike McCracken's BibDesk for Apple Mac. See also BibNet for tools etc.
• The tex2rtf format converter supports use of BibTeX and so may be useful for MS Word users (however EndNote may be a better starting point). Once the conversion has been done, the automatic links between the bibliographic database and the document are lost and have to be maintained by hand. Nb ensure you use the most recent version, older ones are prone to fall over when processing citations.
• There is also support for BibTeX available for users the GNU Emacs editor.
• These templates may be helpful when creating new BibTeX entries.

Using Refer and EndNote

For users who create documents using Microsoft Word or any other comparable word processor on Windows NT, 95 or 98 and who want to access the GP bibliography, the EndNote tool can be used. EndNote is one of the leading bibliographic tools available for these platforms.

To be able to use the bibliography with EndNote, the refer format file should be downloaded and the following steps used to create a usable database.

• If this is the first time you have used EndNote, create a new database for the work you will be doing.
• If you have already created a database, then select the database you want to use.
• In EndNote, set the import filter folder to DIALOG_Online
• Import the refer format file into End Note. The filter to use is called Refer/BibIX.

When updates have been made to the GP bibliography, import the new refer file into EndNote. This will update existing entries if they have been changed, and add new entries. Do not start a new database since this will cause existing citations in documents to become invalid since EndNote uses a sequence number to correlate the citation to the database entry.

Back to other evolutionary bibliographies, web based information etc.