Chapter 10. Bibliographies
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## Chapter 10. Bibliographies

The bibliography is the really hard part of writing a scientific manuscript or a thesis, much harder than generating the data in the first place. This is why RefDB tries to help you with this task as much as possible.

RefDB's job is to provide two kinds of information:

- the bibliographic data

- styling information according to a bibliography and citation style

If the default rendering of citations and bibliographies in the DocBook or TEI stylesheets is appropriate for your purposes, you can get away with using RefDB as a source for raw bibliographies. However, if your output is supposed to match the requirements of a particular journal or publisher, you'll need the styling information as well. There are literally thousands of possible combinations for the formatting of authors, titles, journal names, page and date informations, and almost each of these possiblilities has been adopted by at least one journal or publisher as the one and only citation and bibliography style. The format of the RefDB bibliography styles is described in the first section. The next section will then explain how you generate bibliographies and format your documents.

## Quickstart guide

These are the essential steps to publish documents with formatted citations and a formatted bibliography:

1. Load one or more bibliography styles into your RefDB database, using the addstyle command (this is usually done automatically during post-installation setup, see refdb-init).

2. The bibliography will eventually be available as a separate file (see below). SGML and XML documents have to include this file, either as an external entity or via xinclude. LaTeX or RTF documents need no special care at this point.

3. Insert citations into your document, preferrably using the short notation for SGML/XML documents. LaTeX documents use the regular bibtex commands, whereas RTF uses a plain-text citation format.

4. Run the appropriate commands to create the bibliography and to transform the document. For SGML, XML, and RTF documents this may be as easy as running make pdf, whereas LaTeX users have to run one extra command in addition to the usual bibtex procedure.

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