network effect, BibTeX
network effect, BibTeX
Posted Jan 19, 2006 13:18 UTC (Thu) by pjm (guest, #2080)In reply to: Mostly a matter of the network effect by fredrik
Parent article: Using open-source tools for documenting research
http://bib2web.djvuzone.org/bibtex.html describes BibTeX as the de facto standard for publications in several fields of the hard sciences (physics, mathematics, computer science and engineering. I can confirm this for Computer Science: the name EndNote is unfamiliar to me, whereas BibTeX is used by CiteSeer.
The BibTeX format is plain text and well-understood: see e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BibTeX. The aforementioned http://bib2web.djvuzone.org/bibtex.html points to converters between BibTeX and numerous other important bibliographic formats.
The EndNote web site refers to ftp://support.isiresearchsoft.com/pub/bibtex/ for (apparently Macintosh-only) conversion between BibTeX and EndNote; where one finds ftp://support.isiresearchsoft.com/pub/bibtex/bibtex_expor... which gives the impression that all of the limitations in converting between the two formats are due to limitations in the EndNote format rather than in the BibTeX format.
It may thus be more profitable to seek compatibility between OpenOffice and BibTeX than trying to track a proprietary product like EndNote.
See http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Bibliographic_So... for OpenOffice.org's wiki page on bibliographic software.