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, 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 text editor shell program: etext/etext.exe) are written in AWK.

As a consequence, the user interface of this software is the text based "terminal". If you search bibliographic software you should give References a try, for your first steps go through the tutorial (section 12) of the manual (PDF). 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 in-text-citations
• "Portability" of data: 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, Lua...) for processing text files.

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