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A review of metadata: a survey of current resource description formats
Work Package 3 of Telematics for Research project DESIRE (RE 1004) |
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Bibtex is a program originally designed by Oren Patashnik to create
bibliographies in conjunction with the LaTeX Document Preparation
System. LaTeX, available for most computer systems, is a system
for typesetting documents, independent of the output device. (It
is based on the TeX typesetting system by Donald Knuth). BibTeX
is a separate program that produces the source list for a document,
obtaining the information from a bibliographic database. BibTeX
is described in LaTeX: A Document Preparation System (user's
guide and reference manual), by Leslie Lamport (Addison-Wesley,
2nd ed. 1994). Further documentation: BibteXing and Designing
BibTeX Styles, both by Oren Patashnik, February 8, 1988.
<URL:ftp://ftp.shsu.edu/tex-archive/biblio/bibtex/distribs/doc/>
LaTeX is used in scientific and academic communities, and in industry. Scientists use it to send their papers electronically to colleagues over the world. For this reason it is used inhouse and by many STM publishers.
Experience with the LaTeX system is required to use BibTeX.
The first widely available version of LaTeX (2.09) appeared in 1985. Since then various non-standard enhancements were made, which would not work properly at all sites. A new version (2e) was released in 1994.
LaTeX allows for a variety of bibliography styles. The LaTeX input file must contain a \bibliography command whose argument specifies one or more files that contain the database (bib files), and a \bibliographystyle command, that specifies the format of the source list.
The standard bibliography styles are the following (but a lot of other styles are available):
BibTeX provides entry types for almost any kind of reference within a bibliography. Each entry has its own set of fields, divided into three classes: required, optional and ignored (the last for information that shouldn't get into the bibliography).
In the standard bibliography styles the following entries may be used:
The following is a list of all fields recognized by the standard bibliography styles.
No special fields defined in the standard styles.
No special fields defined in the standard styles.
No special fields defined in the standard styles.
No special fields defined in the standard styles.
No special fields defined in the standard styles.
No special fields defined in the standard styles.
No special fields defined in the standard styles.
BibTeX is not designed for use with any specific set of cataloguing rules. For some fields a few (simple) rules are given, such as for the form of the name of the author. The bibliographic style decides how the field content will appear in the bibliography.
There are commands in LaTeX to generate accents and special symbols used in most western languages. This makes it possible to put bits of non-English text in an English document. They are not adequate for writing a complete document in another language. There is a Babel package which allows the creation of documents in languages other than English as well as multi-language documents.
By crossreferencing links can be made between different entries.
As the primary aim of BibTeX is not to create a bibliographic database that deals with a broad range of bibliographic data, but to format bibliographic references in (scientific) papers, the format is not very extensive. For its purpose the range of fields seems sufficient.
Not associated with particular protocols.
LaTeX is widely used in the scientific communities. Some publishers issue their own macros to enable researches to format their papers according to the standard of the journal.
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