Replacing the BibTeX–LaTeX mechanism

Producing a successor to BibTeX has long been a favoured activity among a certain class of TeX-users; the author has seen many reports of progress (on many projects), over the years, yet few announcements of packages we can use. (There are probably usable packages out there, but none that I know of.)

Two interesting approaches, that the author has investigated, are amsrefs and biblatex. Amsrefs does away with BibTeX altogether, while biblatex makes rather limited use of BibTeX. Both are heavily dependent on LaTeX’s support.

Amsrefs uses a transformed .bib file, which is expressed as LaTeX macros. (The package provides a BibTeX style that performs the transformation, so that a LaTeX source containing a \nocite{*} command enables BibTeX to produce a usable amsrefs bibliography database.)

Amsrefs is maintained by the AMS as part of its author support programme,

Biblatex uses BibTeX more-or-less as normal, but with biblatex’s own style; the style of citations and of the bibliography itself is determined by the way your biblatex style has been set up. This structure eliminates the collections of BibTeX styles, at a stroke; the package comes with a basic set of styles, and details are determined by options, set at package loading time. The author, Philipp Lehman, evaluated the whole field of bibliography software before starting, and as a result the package comes with answers to many of the questions asked in the bibliography sections of these FAQs.

Biblatex is released as experimental software, but it’s clear that many users are already using it happily; Lehman is responsive to problem reports, at the moment, but a set of expert users is already establishing itself.

amsrefs.sty
macros/latex/contrib/amsrefs (gzipped tar, browse)
biblatex.sty
macros/latex/exptl/biblatex (gzipped tar, browse)

This question on the Web: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=biblatex