Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!jarthur!ucivax!ucla-cs!ucla-seas!JAMES@WIFFIN.CHEM.UCLA.EDU
From: james@abby.chem.ucla.edu (James Wilkinson)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: Request for thoughts on using BibTeX.
Message-ID: <009390BE.5D11CCA0@WIFFIN.CHEM.UCLA.EDU>
Date: 2 Jul 90 04:54:45 GMT
Sender: news@SEAS.UCLA.EDU
Reply-To: james@abby.chem.ucla.edu (James Wilkinson)
Organization: Department of Chemistry, UCLA
Lines: 43


    I have decided that it is time for our research group to centralize its
bibliography information.  Since many of you already use large databases of
bibliographies, I thought I'd ask how you do it.

    I want to store both the bibliography specification and a short review of
the reference in a way that is compatible with TeX.  First, there is a question
of how one goes about labelling each reference in an intuitive and unambiguous
manner.  Our references frequently include entries with the same authors
publishing in the same journal in the same year or volume, so a simple scheme
which relies on only these three items isn't enough.

    I would like to use BibTeX to handle referencing from a LaTeX document.
However, it seems difficult to make a reliable algorithm for associating a
label with a given reference that is both intuitive and unique.  What I mean
by "intuitive" is that someone could say "I want to reference the article by
Joe Blow in the 1967 Journal of Irreconcilable Differences, page 555.  So I'll
place a \cite{label} in my LaTeX document and see if somebody has already
entered it." where the label is some obvious string.

    Additionally, I would like people to be able to look up any review
associated with the reference.  When I read a paper, I would like to enter both
the bibliography specification and a review of that paper.  Then I would like
to be able to do something like \review{label} to print out the review of the
reference.

    I could do all this with a simple database, but I want everything to be
compatible with LaTeX.  How do you have LaTeX and your bibliography database
interact?  Any suggestions or pointers appreciated.

JaW

ps. Has anyone written a general makefile for use with BibTeX and LaTeX?  For
instance, if you add a reference to your LaTeX file, you need to re-BibTeX the
.bib file, and LaTeX the .tex file twice.  If you change your .bib file, you
must do the same thing.  If you change the .tex file without changing any
referencing information, you probably only need to LaTeX the .tex file once.

James Wilkinson                            Phone: 1-213-206-5104
Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry     FAX: 1-213-206-5381
University of California, Los Angeles     BITNET: JAMES@UCLACH
405 Hilgard Avenue                      Internet: JAMES@ABBY.CHEM.UCLA.EDU
Los Angeles, California  90024-1569         SPAN: ABBY::JAMES or 5882::JAMES