Bibliographic software

Friday, May 18th, 2007 | Academe

A big, and important, part of academic works is to describe the foundation of your work. That is, you need to cite previous works, create bibliographies and all sorts of things that has a tendency to be a bit annoying for most people. Now, a large portion of people have a tendency to use Microsoft Word or OpenOffice to write texts in (be it assignments, theses, or dissertations), and a frightening portion of people I know using these tools manage their bibliographies in hand without using any tools to ease their work.

For a while there have been some commercial tools in this area, such as RefWorks, and EndNote, which seem to be the two most popular choices. These tools allow you to manage your bibliography in a big database, and more importantly, it integrates with Word so you can pull in a reference from your database and it will format it in accordance with some citation style (APA, MLA, etc.) so you don’t have to sit and double-check whether you’ve remembered all the details of your selected/dictated style. Furthermore, these tools allow you to easily grab material from online publication databases such as PubMed, CiteSeer, and many others, so you don’t have to manually write up all the information about each bibliographic item.

While commercial tools are all fine and well, we have actually had this functionality in LaTeX for a long while using BiBTeX. The catch here is, of course, that you need to maintain your BiBTeX database yourself. So, wouldn’t it be nice if we could get both things? An application that can easily fetch bibliography information from the web, something that can integrate with Word for those who need that, something that can export to BiBTeX so it can be readily used with LaTeX, and even something that can help you keep track of where you put all the articles you need for your thesis? And would it hurt if this thing was actually open source? I think not!

Yesterday my fiancée was complaining about managing bibliographies in Word (I have, unfortunately, been unable to persuade her to change to LaTeX exclusively), and as the kind person I am, I immediately put the followship of the ring, extended edition, on pause and went to look for something that’d help her maintain a database of bibliographies. Something which, preferably, is a tad easier and faster to use than BiBTeX. Now, I’m aware of things like pybliographer that gives BiBTeX a more userfriendly exterior, but I was aiming for something a little more userfriendly and more like RefWords and EndNote with integration to Word.

And lo and behold, after a short while of searching, I came upon one of the most nifty extensions to Firefox that I have seen to date: Zotero. This extension integrates your bibliographic database management directly into the application most of us use to find literature with: the browser. As an added bonus it also offers integration with Word, it works across platforms, it’s open source. Basically it fulfills all the needs I listed above to perfection. Count me amazed. I will definitely be using this for myself as well and just export to BiBTeX when I need to cite works from my LaTeX documents.

For the more technically minded of us who have a tendency to prefer our own variations on bibliographies and citations (when we aren’t otherwise bound by journals or other draconian requirements) and thus create our own .bst-styles for BiBTeX, then Zotero uses the Citation Style Language, which is an XML-based format for formatting citations and bibliographies. Lastly, Zotero has been funded and developed by the Center for History and New Media, so this is a tool by the academe for the academe with a commercial tool’s polish. Give it a try today.

No comments yet.

Leave a comment