BibSonomy ::  url ::

Bibliographic management and citation formatting are central to the practice of all manner of research. The current bibliographic software landscape is divided broadly between a commercial market characterized by buggy software and glacial innovation, and an open software ecosystem built around BibTeX. BibTeX’s success is a function of three factors. First, BibTeX was designed to solve real needs: allowing LaTeX users to format their manuscripts according to detailed publisher specifications. Second, it has a dedicated styling language to configure such formatting. Finally, it focuses on a single task: bibliographic and citation encoding and formatting. As a result, a variety of tools have been built around it. A GUI application designer can simply focus on how best to manage references, without having to worry about the obscure complexities of bibliographic and citation formatting. Nevertheless, BibTeX is otherwise quite limited. Its data model is unsuitable for demanding users in the social sciences and humanities, it has no international support, its styling language is written in an obscure language that is very difficult to work with, and it is limited to LaTeX.