Bibliographies and referencing

Sunday, 8 June, 2008

Referencing is a bit of a black art in universities and something we try to drum in from the first year. If you present an idea or piece of information that is not your, cite it. That then requires the use of a reference list and whilst universities are generally happy to stick with a Harvard “style”, most journals are not. This of course means there must be 1,000’s of reference styles actively in use. The de facto standard in referencing is Endnote which is a very accomplished (and relatively expensive) package that combines both a bibliographic database with a style manager, all of which can be copied in to Microsoft Word ready formatted. Of course you can go one step further and simply insert a “tag” within Word to your cited article and then get it to dynamically build the reference list. Endnote also went down the portable route and wrote a Palm application as well.

Clearly this is a profitable market and there are quite a few vendors around offering such products, as well as some quite good online applications, Refworks being the one that we use at Kingston.

Not to be outdone, it is worth mentioning that Latex has long had a very effective system that is similar (called BibTex). As ever, the database is a marked up text file that is then used to dynamically build the reference list. It is very sophisticated and can handle pretty much every citation requirement. Of course its non too user friendly and there have been a few GUIs developed, the most popular of which is Jabref. It is a Java programme so cross-platform, fast and well designed. It even comes with some custom import/export-ers (“Tools->Unpack Endnote filter set”) to make the transition with Endnote pretty good. However note that it is a GUI for building a bibliographic database, it is not a style manager. So whilst you can export HTML and RTF formats of your database you donot have the rich styles provided by Endnote. There is currently work underway for an Open Office Plugin but very little in the way fo the styles themselves. Another (open source) alternative is Zotero which is a Firefox plugin that offers a database and a rapidly expanding set of stylesheets. This rapidly seems to be becomign a popular choice. Of course the reason I’ve ended up using Jabref is that…. I use Latex!

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