Biblatex is a complete reimplementation of the bibliographic facilities provided by LaTeX in conjunction with BibTeX. It redesigns the way in which LaTeX interacts with BibTeX at a fairly fundamental level. With biblatex, BibTeX is only used (if it is used at all) to sort the bibliography and to generate labels. Formatting of the bibliography is entirely controlled by TeX macros (the BibTeX-based mechanism embeds some parts of formatting in the BibTeX style file. Good working knowledge in LaTeX should be sufficient to design new bibliography and citation styles; nothing related to BibTeX’s language is needed.
BibTeX is a program and file format designed by Oren Patashnik and Leslie Lamport in 1985 for the LaTeX document preparation system. The format is entirely character based, so it can be used by any program (although the standard character set for accents is TeX). It is field (tag) based and the BibTeX program will ignore unknown fields, so it is expandable. It is probably the most common format for bibliographies on the Internet.
Choosing a BibTeX Style
* How to Choose a Specific Style
* The Seven Standard Styles
* Styles Recommended by Reed
* NatBib Standard Styles
o Citation Commands Within NatBib
* Styles Available Through CTAN
o Discipline Specific Listings of BibTeX Journal Styles