Concepts for development of References

References is designed as tool to support writing scientific papers and to help organizing bibliographic data. It is written in C using almost exclusively the ANSI C subset, which should allow a maximum of portability (although it is now developed on a Linux system). Some additional scripts to be used as command line tools (or by the menu options of the new text editor shell program: etext/etext.exe) are written in AWK (as perl is not available on many Win32-systems of normal users and the awk-interpreter can be made available to many computing platforms including Win32).

As a consequence, the user interface of this software is the text based "console". If you search bibliographic software you should give References a try, for your first steps go through the "tutorial"-section of the documentation. Comments are always welcome (see email address below).

Main goals

• Transparency and clarity of all procedures: automation of all processes goes only to a point which allows the user to understand what she/he does when she/he
• scans a document for reference numbers,
• creates the list of references and
• makes and uses macros to generate correct citations in the text of the word processor
• Portability of data structure: Although References processes data internally in a binary database, everything can be exported into text files, can be inspected manually in a text editor and transferred to another database program.
• References is developed following the principle to provide only those functions, which are absolutely necessary: for editing text, an external text editor will be much more comfortable than a procedure for editing "database fields" within References.
• References shall be open to changes and to extensions: The experienced user shall be able to add format definitions, scripts (AWK, perl, Python...) for processing text files, for the experienced user, it should be possible to port the program to another platform.

The program author may be reached at <kiev AT users DOT sourceforge DOT net>.

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