15 Generación de bibliografía

While a table of contents (see Section 2.3) and an index (discussed in Chapter 14) make it easier to navigate through a book, the presence of bibliographic references should allow you to verify the sources and to probe further subjects you consider interesting. To make this possible, the references should be precise and lead to the relevant work with a minimum of effort.

There exist many ways to format bibliographies, and different fields of scholarly activities have developed very precise rules in this area. An interesting overview of Anglo-Saxon practices can be found in the chapter on bibliographies in The Chicago Manual of Style [40]. Normally, authors must follow the rules laid out by their publisher. Therefore, one of the more important tasks when submitting a book or an article for publication is to generate the bibliographic reference list according to those rules.

Traditional ways of composing such lists by hand, without the systematic help of computers, are plagued with the following problems:

• Citations and references, particularly in a document with contributions from many authors, are hard to make consistent. Difficulties arise, such as variations in the use of full forenames versus abbreviations (with or without periods); italicization or quoting of titles; spelling “ed.”, “Ed.”, or “Editor”; and the various forms of journal volume number.

• A bibliography laid out in one style (e.g., alphabetic by author and year) is extremely hard to convert to another (e.g., numeric citation order) if requested by a publisher.

• It is difficult to maintain one large database of bibliographic references that can

be reused in different documents.

In the present chapter we concentrate on the formatting of reference lists and bibliographies, and we discuss possibilities for managing collections of bibliographic references in databases. The chapter is heavily based on the BIBTEX program, written by Oren Patashnik, and the biber program written by François Charette and now maintained by Philip Kime, which both integrate well with LaTEX. In Chapter 16 we are then mainly concerned with the citation of sources within the text.

We start by showing how a bibliography can be created manually in LaTEX. Because the standard environment is also used in the output of most BIBTEX styles, this prepares the ground for the BIBTEX workflow. We then introduce the two programs. This is followed by a detailed introduction to the database format1 used to specify bibliographical data in a suitable form for processing with BIBTEX or biber. We continue with a description of how to produce bibliographic input files for LaTEX from these databases.

Instead of collecting your own bibliographical data, there is also the possibility of drawing information from various online sources that offer such data in BIBTEX format. Some of them are introduced in Section 15.5.

Having collected data for BIBTEX databases, the next natural step is to look for tools that help in managing such databases. Section 15.6 offers tools of various flavors for this task, ranging from command-line utilities to GUI-based programs for various platforms.

Finally, in Section 15.7 we return to the task of typesetting a bibliography and discuss how different BIBTEX and biblatex styles can be used to produce different bibliography layouts from the same input. Because there may not be a suitable style for a particular set of layout requirements available, Section 15.7.2 discusses how to generate customized styles using the custom-bib package without the need for any BIBTEX style programming. How to create or adapt styles for biblatex is discussed in Chapter 16 where we review that package in detail.