BibTeX

BibTeX

Original author(s)	Oren Patashnik, Leslie Lamport
Developer(s)	Oren Patashnik
Initial release	March 1985;39 years ago (1985-03)
Stable release	0.99d / March 2010;14 years ago (2010-03)
Repository	https://tug.org/svn/texlive/trunk/Build/source/texk/web2c/
Written in	WEB
Platform	Cross-platform
Included with	TeX Live
Size	384614 bytes
Available in	English
Type	Reference management software
License	Knuth License
Website	Official website

BibTeX is both a bibliographic flat-file database file format and a software program for processing these files to produce lists of references (citations). The BibTeX file format is a widely used standard with broad support by reference management software.

Contents

• Processor
• History
• Reimplementations
• Database files
• Entry types
• Field types
• Style files
• Examples of uses
• See also
• References
• External links

The BibTeX program comes bundled with the LaTeX document preparation system, and is not available as a stand-alone program. ^[1] Within this typesetting system its name is styled as ${\displaystyle {\mathrm {B{\scriptstyle {IB}}\!T\!_{\displaystyle E}\!X} }}$. The name is a portmanteau of the word bibliography and the name of the TeX typesetting software.

BibTeX was created by Oren Patashnik in 1985. No updates were published between February 1988 and March 2010, when the package was updated to improve URL printing and clarify the license. There are various reimplementations of the program.

The purpose of BibTeX is to make it easy to cite sources in a consistent manner, by separating bibliographic information from the presentation of this information, similarly to the separation of content and presentation/style supported by LaTeX itself.

Processor

The processor program works with several specific files to produce the reference list and format the citations. In the words of the program's author Oren Patashnik, the processor works as follows: ^[2]

It takes as input:

1. an .aux file produced by LaTeX on an earlier run;
2. a .bst file (the style file), which specifies the general reference-list style and specifies how to format individual entries, and which is written by a style designer [..] in a special-purpose language [..], and
3. .bib file(s) constituting a database of all reference-list entries the user might ever hope to use.

BibTeX chooses from the .bib file(s) only those entries specified by the .aux file (that is, those given by LaTeX's \cite or \nocite commands), and creates as output a .bbl file containing these entries together with the formatting commands specified by the .bst file [..]. LaTeX will use the .bbl file, perhaps edited by the user, to produce the reference list.

Database files

BibTeX uses a style-independent text-based file format, a kind of flat-file database, to store bibliography items, such as articles, books, and theses. BibTeX database file names usually end in .bib. A BibTeX database file is formed by a list of entries, with each entry corresponding to a bibliographical item. Entry types correspond to various types of bibliographic sources such as article, book, or conference.

An example entry which describes a mathematical handbook would be structured as an entry name followed by a list of fields, such as author and title:

@Book{abramowitz+stegun,author="Milton {Abramowitz} and Irene A. {Stegun}",title="Handbook of Mathematical Functions with              Formulas, Graphs, and Mathematical Tables",publisher="Dover",year=1964,address="New York City",edition="ninth Dover printing, tenth GPO printing"}

If a document references this handbook, the bibliographic information may be formatted in different ways depending on which citation style (APA, MLA, Chicago etc.) is employed. The way LaTeX deals with this is by specifying \cite commands and the desired bibliography style in the LaTeX document. If the command \cite{abramowitz+stegun}<nowiki /> appears inside a LaTeX document, the bibtex program will include this book in the list of references for the document and generate appropriate LaTeX formatting code. When viewing the formatted LaTeX document, the result might look like this:

Abramowitz, Milton and Irene A. Stegun (1964), Handbook of mathematical functions with formulas, graphs, and mathematical tables. New York: Dover.

Depending on the style file, BibTeX may rearrange authors' last names, change the case of titles, omit fields present in the .bib file, format text in italics, add punctuation, etc. Since the same style file is used for an entire list of references, these are all formatted consistently with minimal effort required from authors or editors.

Style files

BibTeX formats bibliographic items according to a style file, typically by generating TeX or LaTeX formatting commands, but style files can also be used to generate other types of output like HTML. BibTeX style files commonly use the file extension .bst and are written in a simple, stack-based programming language (dubbed "BibTeX Anonymous Forth-Like Language", or "BAFLL", by Drew McDermott ^[8] ) that describes how bibliography items should be formatted. There are some packages that can generate .bst files automatically, such as custom-bib and Bib-it. ^{[9] [10]}

Most journals or publishers that support LaTeX use a customized bibliographic style file for the convenience of the authors, often included as part of a complete LaTeX template.

Examples of uses

• Astrophysics Data System – The NASA ADS is an online database of over eight million astronomy and physics papers and provides BibTeX format citations.
• BibDesk – Open-source software application for macOS for creating, editing, managing, and searching BibTeX files.
• BibSonomy – A social bookmark and publication management system based on BibTeX.
• Citavi – Reference manager. Works with various TeX-Editors and supports BibTeX input and output.
• CiteSeer – An online database of research publications which can produce BibTeX format citations.
• CiteULike (discontinued) – A community based bibliography database that had BibTeX input and output.
• The Collection of Computer Science Bibliographies – uses BibTeX as internal data format, search results and contributions primarily in BibTeX.
• Connotea – Open-source social bookmark style publication management system.
• Digital Bibliography & Library Project – A bibliography website that lists more than 910,000 articles in the computer science field.
• Google Books – The bibliographic information for each book is exportable in BibTeX format via the 'Export Citation' feature.
• Google Scholar – Google's system for searching scholarly literature provides BibTeX format citations if the option is enabled in 'Scholar Preferences'.
• Google Research – Housed within the artificial intelligence division of Google is a compilation of publications by Google staff with BibTeX citation links.
• HubMed – A versatile PubMed interface including BibTeX output.
• INSPIRE-HEP – The INSPIRE High-Energy Physics literature database provides BibTeX format citations for over one million high-energy physics papers.
• JabRef – Open-source cross-platform software application for creating, editing, managing, and searching BibTeX and BibLaTeX files.
• MathSciNet – Database by the American Mathematical Society (subscription), choose BibTeX in the "Select alternative format" box
• Mendeley – Reference manager, for collecting papers. It supports exporting collections into bib files and keep them synchronized with its own database. ^[11]
• Paperpile – Reference manager, supports BibTeX input and output. BibTeX output can be customized.
• Pandoc – Open-source document converter that can read a BibTeX file and produce formatted citations in any bibliography style specified in a citation style language (CSL) file.
• Qiqqa – Software application for Windows that includes a fully featured BibTeX editor and validator, along with tools for automatically populating BibTeX records for PDFs.
• refbase – Open-source reference manager for institutional repositories and self archiving with BibTeX input and output.
• RefTeX – Emacs based reference manager.
• Wikindx – Open-source virtual research environment/enhanced bibliography manager including BibTeX input and output.
• Wikipedia – Pressing cite this page in the Tools menu of an article provides a BibTeX format citation.
• Zentralblatt MATH – Database by the European Mathematical Society, FIZ Karlsruhe and Heidelberg Academy (subscription, 3 free entries); choose BibTeX button or format.
• Zotero – Open-source reference manager with advanced features such as synchronization between different computers, social bookmarking, searching inside saved PDFs and BibTeX output.

See also

Data schemes

• EndNote – a text-based data scheme used by the EndNote program
• refer – an aging text-based data scheme supported on UNIX-like systems
• RIS – a text-based data scheme from Research Information Systems
• Bebop – a web-based front-end interface for BibTeX

Other

• Citation Style Language – a newer XML-based bibliography style specification analogous to BibTeX's .bst files but processed instead by the CiteProc program
• Comparison of reference management software
• List of TeX extensions

Related Research Articles

LaTeX is a software system for typesetting documents. LaTeX markup describes the content and layout of the document, as opposed to the formatted text found in WYSIWYG word processors like Microsoft Word, LibreOffice Writer and Apple Pages. The writer uses markup tagging conventions to define the general structure of a document, to stylise text throughout a document, and to add citations and cross-references. A TeX distribution such as TeX Live or MiKTeX is used to produce an output file suitable for printing or digital distribution.

A citation is a reference to a source. More precisely, a citation is an abbreviated alphanumeric expression embedded in the body of an intellectual work that denotes an entry in the bibliographic references section of the work for the purpose of acknowledging the relevance of the works of others to the topic of discussion at the spot where the citation appears.

LyX is an open source, graphical user interface document processor based on the LaTeX typesetting system. Unlike most word processors, which follow the WYSIWYG paradigm, LyX has a WYSIWYM approach, where what shows up on the screen roughly depicts the semantic structure of the page and is only an approximation of the document produced by TeX.

XeTeX is a TeX typesetting engine using Unicode and supporting modern font technologies such as OpenType, Graphite and Apple Advanced Typography (AAT). It was originally written by Jonathan Kew and is distributed under the X11 free software license.

CiteULike was a web service which allowed users to save and share citations to academic papers. Based on the principle of social bookmarking, the site worked to promote and to develop the sharing of scientific references amongst researchers. In the same way that it is possible to catalog web pages or photographs, scientists could share citation information using CiteULike. Richard Cameron developed CiteULike in November 2004 and in 2006 Oversity Ltd. was established to develop and support CiteULike. In February 2019, CiteULike announced that it would be ceasing operations as of March 30, 2019.

refer is a program for managing bibliographic references, and citing them in troff, nroff, and groff documents. It is implemented as a preprocessor.

JabRef is an open-source, cross-platform citation and reference management software. It is used to collect, organize and search bibliographic information.

EndNote is a commercial reference management software package, used to manage bibliographies and references when writing essays, reports and articles. EndNote was written by Richard Niles, and ownership changed hands several times since it was launched in 1989 by Niles & Associates: in 2000 it was acquired by Institute for Scientific Information’s ResearchSoft Division, part of Thomson Corporation, and in 2016 by Clarivate. EndNote's main competitors are Mendeley and Zotero. Unlike Mendeley and Zotero, EndNote is neither free-to-use nor offers a freemium model.

RIS is a standardized tag format developed by Research Information Systems, Incorporated to enable citation programs to exchange data. It is supported by a number of reference managers. Many digital libraries, like Web of Science, IEEE Xplore, Scopus, the ACM Portal, Scopemed, ScienceDirect, SpringerLink, Rayyan, The Lens, Accordance Bible Software, and online library catalogs can export citations in this format. Citation management applications can export and import citations in this format.

Zotero is free and open-source reference management software to manage bibliographic data and related research materials, such as PDF and ePUB files. Features include web browser integration, online syncing, generation of in-text citations, footnotes, and bibliographies, integrated PDF, ePUB and HTML readers with annotation capabilities, and a note editor, as well as integration with the word processors Microsoft Word, LibreOffice Writer, and Google Docs. It was originally created at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University and, as of 2021, is developed by the non-profit Corporation for Digital Scholarship.

OttoBib.com was a website with a free tool to generate an alphabetized bibliography of books from a list of International Standard Book Numbers (ISBN) with output in MLA, APA, Chicago/Turabian, BibTeX and Wikipedia {{cite book}} format. Each query also generated a "temporary" permalink which could be used to recall the bibliography without reentering the ISBN data. The site was a metasearch engine, integrating data from several sources, including the U.S. Library of Congress API, the Amazon.com database of books, and ISBNdb.com. OttoBib accepted ISBNs with either 10 or 13 digits.

The following tables compare notable reference management software. The comparison includes older applications that may no longer be supported, as well as actively-maintained software.

BibDesk is an open-source reference management software package for macOS, used to manage bibliographies and references when writing essays and articles. It can also be used to organize and maintain a library of documents in PDF format and other formats. It is primarily a BibTeX front-end for use with LaTeX, but also offers external bibliographic database connectivity for importing, a variety of means for exporting, and capability for linking to local documents and automatically filing local documents. It takes advantage of many macOS features such as AppleScript and Spotlight.

The AMSRefs package is an extension package for LaTeX that facilitates the creation of bibliographies and citations in LaTeX documents. Use of AMSRefs allows for the retention of rich markup that makes references easier to reuse in other publishing environments, such as on the Web, in other book or journal formats, or with citation services. The package is available for free on the American Mathematical Society's website.

WIKINDX is a free bibliographic and quotations/notes management and article authoring system designed either for single use and multi-user collaborative use across the internet. WIKINDX falls within the category of reference management software, but also provides functionality to write notes and entire papers.

Bebop is a web-based BibTeX front-end that creates a web interface to a list of publications stored in a BibTeX file and allows browsing by author, year, document type, topic and keywords using PHP, JavaScript and XML technologies. It can be mainly used by individuals and institutes for self-archiving and creating institutional repositories.

A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations is a style guide for writing and formatting research papers, theses, and dissertations and is published by the University of Chicago Press.

Biber is a bibliography information processing program that works in conjunction with the LaTeX package BibLaTeX and offers full Unicode support.

MultiMarkdown is a lightweight markup language created by Fletcher T. Penney as an extension of the Markdown format. It supports additional features not available in plain Markdown syntax.

Pandoc is a free-software document converter, widely used as a writing tool and as a basis for publishing workflows. It was created by John MacFarlane, a philosophy professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

References

External links

The Wikibook LaTeX has a page on the topic of: Bibliography Management

• Official website
• bibtex.org third-party site.
• BibTeXing. The original manual (1988) by the co-author of BibTeX, Oren Patashnik.
• Managing Citations and Your Bibliography with BibTeX by Jürgen Fenn (The PracTeX Journal 2006, number 4).
• BibTeX tutorial. Section from Getting to Grips with LaTeX tutorials.