BibTeX help wanted

October 2, 2005 12:20 PM

Any BibTeX gurus around here? I'd like recommendations for software, running on Linux, that will help me develop and manage a bibliographical database, and for BibTeX styles/packages/whatever-they're-calleds developed for with humanities, as opposed to science or math, types in mind.

I'm told jurabib is good on the latter score, but it seems to be primarily developed for German law formats, with Chicago/MLA styles in development for American anglophones. And if jurabib defines new fields, or defines them differently, does that mean that software for managing bibliographies wouldn't add them right? (There is such software, yes? People don't really write them out by hand?)

Any tips & tricks greatly appreciated.

posted by kenko to technology (18 comments total)

One option that I know of is bibtool. I've never used it myself.

(There is such software, yes? People don't really write them out by hand?)

Some people may not, but most seem to. It's not actually all that hard to maintain a personal bibtex file by hand, if you like using text editors in the first place - Emacs has a decent bibtex mode. I have a bibtex file with about 350 entries that I've been gradually adding to for a few years. I'm hoping someone will post the itunes of .pdf files in this thread, but a few months ago I tried to do a thorough scouring of the web for decent reference managing software, and came up blank. It doesn't even seem to be easy to find a simple bug-free parser for bibtex files (I wanted to integrate bibtex entries into my personal wiki, in a more comprehensive way than existing plugins do). I hope someone has had better luck than me!
posted by advil at 12:59 PM on October 2, 2005

I've heard good things about JabRef, though I still write mine by hand.

As for styles, you'll probably just want to find a big list of examples, pick one you like, and download it from CTAN.
posted by gleuschk at 1:02 PM on October 2, 2005

Can't help you on the manager front. I just keep my bibliography.bib open in a tab in WinEDT.

I do political science. In my papers, I have a \usepackage{harvard} , and a \bibliographystyle{apsr}. Both are widely available, and probably standard in some installations. apsr.bst is, AFAIK, just a mod of apalike.bst.

The harvard package includes \cite{}, \citeasnoun{} so that things like "As Foo (1987) argues" can be "As \citeasnoun{mnemonic} argues," \nocite{} to include something in references without a citation, and (I think) a \citeyear{}. The references section ends up being normal, without numbered entries or abbreviated names or other hard-science stuff.

I've found it most useful myself to just hard-input citations and follow them with a \nocite{}, so that I can more easily dump to rtf if a journal wants.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 1:04 PM on October 2, 2005

People don't really write them out by hand?

I'm not sure what you mean. When I add a new entry to my bibliography.bib, I copy an older entry of the same type (ie, book, article), delete the relevant bits, and dump in the new ones by hand. In an average paper, I might need to add 5--10 new entries, taking me maybe five minutes. My file has ~200 entries in it so far.

It probably helps that I use really rigid mnemonics -- authoryear, so that an article by Dewey, Cheatham, and Howe (1984) would *always and only* be in as deweycheathamhowe1984 , and never as dch84 or deweyetal84. This means that I just enter the \nocite{} commands and then see what pops up as an error. It also helps that WinEDT will drop in an empty entry of most all types if you want it to.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 1:14 PM on October 2, 2005

I key mine in by hand. In fact, I quit using BibTeX a few years ago: I found it too much trouble to have multiple files for each article. Now I just use the LaTeX bibilography environment, typing in any reference I've never used before (or cut-and-pasting from MathSciNet) and copying the rest from older articles.
posted by escabeche at 1:28 PM on October 2, 2005

Slight derail: Man, I really need to learn how to do this. The bibliography is the bane of my existence. Is there an intro to BibTeX or LaTeX out there? How does EndNote fit into all of this, or is it just not as good as LaTex? A primer on this would be incredibly useful if someone can point me in the right direction.
posted by fionab at 1:38 PM on October 2, 2005

I will second JabRef. I use it with LyX to write academic papers and articles.
posted by achmorrison at 1:50 PM on October 2, 2005

I'm not sure what you mean. When I add a new entry to my bibliography.bib, I copy an older entry of the same type (ie, book, article), delete the relevant bits, and dump in the new ones by hand.

Well, lots of this information is available—I could imagine software such that you just entered (for books, obviously) the ISBN and it fetched author, publisher, date, &c.. Or at least an environment that prompts for the relevant bits. This may only matter for newbies, but I'm a newbie, and having jabref tell me what the field names are even called is helpful.

Escabeche—I thought the whole idea was that you didn't need multiple dbs, but could instead have a freestanding database to which multiple papers could refer?
posted by kenko at 2:07 PM on October 2, 2005

I really need to learn how to do this

It feels sort of like writing very basic HTML by hand. There is a definite learning curve, and it takes getting used to. But it's nothing intrinsically difficult.

Is there an intro to BibTeX or LaTeX out there?

Many. If you google around a bit, you should be able to find several slideshows that are introductory evangelizations about LaTeX. The canonical intro source is probably the Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX2e. (warning: large pdf)

There are also intros to BibTeX, but really the best place to look is in the documentation for the particular bibliography package (harvard, natbib, etc) you end up using.

How does EndNote fit into all of this

It doesn't. Except that there are converters in both directions.

is it just not as good as LaTex?

Apples and oranges. Endnote does citations, LaTeX is a full-on typesetting system.

Advantages of LaTeX over a Word/Endnote combo:

(1) It's free. Double free if you use an open-source editor.
(2) It's future-proof. You write in plain ascii with commands, sort of like html. You don't have to worry that Word or whatever of 2012 won't be able to read your file.
(3) It generates much nicer output. Not as good as if you hired a human typesetter to set your work for you, but a whole damn bunch better than Word output.
(4) It outputs straight to pdf, if you want. Or you can output to postscript. This is handy in the apple/unix world.
(5) It encourages structured, content-based writing, because it uses logical markup instead of physical markup. Mostly.
(6) Support is fabulous. There's a wealth of built-in documentation, and a bunch of google-able information, and there's comp.text.tex, which last I checked was full of helpful people who don't snark at newbies.
(7) It handles integration of mathematical expressions far, far, far better than Word does.
(8) It deals with long documents (like dissertations) with consummate ease instead of constant fear and trepidation.
(9) Along the same lines, many / most major schools have a class file for their dissertations and theses, which makes satisfying The Great And Terrible Ruler Lady easy.

Disadvantages of LaTeX compared to a Word/Endnote combo:

(1) It can make dealing with coauthors a pain in the ass, unless they use LaTeX too.
(2) If you're submitting to a journal that wants Word (and some do, for reasons probably involving Cthulhu), you'll have an extra step at some point to convert your paper. I've had to do this a couple times, and it's no big deal.
(3) Tables can be a pain in the ass. The easiest way to do them, AFAIC, is to lay them out in Excel and then use a free Excel-->LaTeX converter.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 2:07 PM on October 2, 2005

ROU_Xenophobe: You're awesome. Thanks so much. My fall break will be full of learning goodness. Clearly I'm way behind on all of this, and I'd really like to not be, but was a little overwhelmed at it all. Thanks for the intro primer.
posted by fionab at 2:13 PM on October 2, 2005

I could imagine software such that you just entered (for books, obviously) the ISBN and it fetched author, publisher, date, &c..

Sure. I haven't seen that, but there's no reason it couldn't be done. I have seen science journals that make their contents available as bib entries.

Or at least an environment that prompts for the relevant bits.

I think that's an editor job. I use WinEDT, and it'll do that. Just hit insert-->bib entry-->book, and it plops down an @BOOK with all possibly-relevant blank fields. I wouldn't be surprised if the (free) winshell did it as well. If you use a Mac, everyone loves TeXshop.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 2:15 PM on October 2, 2005

fionab: ta much. It's really not so hard -- try transcribing your last paper from Word/whatever into LaTeX, and then writing your next one from scratch in LaTeX. That's what people told me, anyhow, and it seemed to work.

The other pain-in-the-ass bit is that it can be admittedly a bit fiddly to get all of the various bits of a full LaTeX installation on XP -- MikTeX, ghostscript, ghostview, and an editor -- up and running, and configured to play well with each other.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 2:19 PM on October 2, 2005

I'll definitely try your suggestion to transcribe then write from scratch. I'm on a Mac. I'm in the humanities, so my needs won't include math, tables (maybe on the very, very odd occasion), econ, or equations; nothing, really, that isn't words and punctuation. Even better would be something that would grab the info from my Delicious library and combine it automatically with the LaTeX bibliography. Oh man, that would be heaven (hint, hint :-).
posted by fionab at 2:31 PM on October 2, 2005

fionab: that, or similar functionality for librarything, combined with a web-based, tag-aware repository for individual quotations and passages, would be heavenly for me.
posted by kenko at 2:39 PM on October 2, 2005

In fact, I quit using BibTeX a few years ago: I found it too much trouble to have multiple files for each article.

Of reasons to not use bibtex, this one is somewhat surprising - I just have a symbolic link from whatever directory I am work in to a master .bib file in one central location. There have got to be any number of other solutions to this problem, too.
posted by advil at 2:47 PM on October 2, 2005

kenko: I think we have a project idea!
posted by fionab at 3:51 PM on October 2, 2005

Emacs bibtex mode is fine. A function to visit the locally stored pdf in the current bibtex entry [may exist] would be useful. On the mac, I like using Bibtool.

I do the \usepackage{harvard} ... stuff recommentde by ROU_xenophobe too.
posted by singingfish at 5:19 PM on October 2, 2005

I've had good luck with BibDesk on the Mac, and I know there's a collaborative, tagging, bibtex-compatible thingy at citeulike.org, but I haven't played with it much.
posted by tew at 12:05 PM on October 3, 2005