[Taxacom] Questions re sharing bibliographic resources

[Una Smith]

On Sat, Feb 28, 2009 at 08:44:03AM -0700, Mary Barkworth wrote:
>I am looking for a way to share references with others working on the
>same groups as me. There must be free, open source software out there
>than can be used for this purpose - and people who can comment, on or
>off line, about its pluses and minuses.

This is an old thread, but I have not seen mentioned the LaTeX/Natbib
based system that is used on the mathematics and physics community
archives, and on a few other specialty community archives.  I like
LaTeX/Natbib for taxonomic work because it handles so incredibly well
difficult orthographies and multiple languages, and because it is so
easy to change citation and bibliography styles (to suit publisher's
house styles) without making any changes to the bibliography and only
trivial changes to the document.

One large collaborative project that I know uses the same system is
the annual HIV sequence and immunology compendia.  Starting a few
years ago, all the refs went directly into the database and all the
compendia pages (apart from the intro and special articles) are
generated by a script directly from the database.  Formerly, the
epitope maps were made by hand, and all pages were laid out by hand,
requiring several man months of work per year.

http://www.hiv.lanl.gov/content/sequence/HIV/COMPENDIUM/compendium.html
http://www.hiv.lanl.gov/content/immunology/compendium.html

I have been using LaTeX and Natbib since 1992. 

The main downside is:  the natural output is a PDF, which you then
have to convert to MSWord for many publishers.

	Una Smith
	New Mexico