Albert Weichselbraun

LaTeX Bibliography Management

less than 1 minute read

Motivation

BibTeX is an open source software for managing and formatting bibliographic references using LaTeX. Many current BibTeX implementations have a number of shortcomings including:

  1. missing utf8 support
  2. the unnecessarily complicated bibstyle format (bst) for specifying a bibliography’s format
  3. no support for bibliography formats other than .bib-files

Various projects to re-create BibTeX try to address these problems but have failed so far to provide a feasible alternative to BibTeX.

The goal of this thesis is to

  1. determine criteria and requirements for a bibliography management software
  2. compare existing software to these requirements
  3. rewrite BibTeX (in python) addressing the shortcomings mentioned above, including the quality criteria identified above.

Tasks

  • literature review: bibliography management (approaches, requirements, …)
  • recherche: bibliography management software (commercial, open source, BibTex frontends)
  • latex bibtex integration
  • design: bibtex-ng
    • utf8 support
    • extensibility
    • support of the traditional bibtex .bst format
    • support of custom style files (compare: mlbibtex, …)
    • export formats (endnote, …)
  • evaluation:
    • BibTex compatibility
    • usability

UML component diagram

Student profile

  • excellent programming skills (preferable in python)

Literature to start

Updated:

You may also enjoy