Brief review of some software available:


There's an excellent post to get started here:
http://mandrakeforum.com/article.php?lang=en&sid=2039


perl scripts by Dana Jacobsen:
http://www.ecst.csuchico.edu/~jacobsd/bib/archives/bp-0.2.97.tar.gz
Not touched in over 6 years, seem to work, no modern citation formats
supported, no fields supported beyond the basic bibtex ones.

sixpack:
http://www.santafe.edu/~dirk/sixpack/
An absolutely dog-slow and ugly-as GUI frontend to the perl scripts,
programmed in perl and tk. Completely useless (probably because of perl/tk?).

refdb:
http://refdb.sourceforge.net/
Somehow I don't think I'm gonna spend 2 days compiling all the prerequisites,
and set up mysql just to be able to deal with a single citation (though it does
more than that, but it's all-or-nothing). Can't comment on performance once set
up.

bibutils:
http://www.scripps.edu/~cdputnam/software/bibutils.html
Fast conversion filters programmed in C.

pybliographic:
http://canvas.gnome.org:65348/pybliographer/
The most promosing is pybliographic. It's fast and flexible, and looks good
(although with any app I find the gnome open file dialog badly done).



In general, any bibliographic software will need to be able to read a
range of common citation formats. Open source is currently lacking
there. For bibliography-maintenance beyond a text editor (my approach
so far), applications like endnote is the standard. Entries need to be
viewed and edited easily. endnote can also connect to data bases and
run searches and retrieve results, they call it connections, I don't
need it but I can see busy people being keen on it because it hides the
differences in user interfaces between data bases.

As a suggestion for pybliographic, double-clicking an entry in the top
pane to open a new window which allows to edit this entry is not
user-friendly enough. The bottom-pane shows the entry anyway, it should
directly allow to edit it. There possibly should be an option to have
the bottom pane in a separate window, and when selecting a different
entry in the top pane (single click) the second window updates (*not*
re-opens!). I noticed that soem of the text fields can be too small,
it's no good reading a bibtex field with 80char*10line contents in a
viewslot of 2lines*40chars. The latter can be a show-stopper for
usability. What I really like about pybliographic is the easy way to
add new fields! A separate command line interface is very useful too.


Volker