> Phillip Helbig wrote: > > Although I guess there is no reason to REQUIRE a journal to support > > bibliographies generated by BibTeX, it seems a sensible thing to do, > > since in practice hand-coded \bibitems will not be perfect. Of course, > > Requiring BibTeX? Read it again---I said require a journal to SUPPORT bibliographies generated by BibTeX, not require the USE of BibTeX. > At least in Mathematics where the speed > of publication and the pool of potential references for a given > topic are relatively low, BibTeX can be quite an obstruction. If you would rather do it by hand, go ahead. However, with custom-bib it is literally less work to generate a .bst file from scratch and type the references into a .bib file than to code it by hand. Really. It's that user friendly. And if the speed of publication is slow, you're guarded against the journal style changing on you. > Especially in the case of several authors collaborating > via e-mail, and each author being involved in several disjoint > collaborations, I don't know how to efficiently use bibtex > other than having a separate bibliography database for each paper > (which directly contradicts the goal of bibtex...) This is a more important point. Since I'm catching up on old posts, I'll wait and see if anyone has contributed any answer to this first. > Writing a bibliography is trivial compared to every other aspect > in writing a paper, so let's leave it that way. I disagree. If the basis of the paper is a conference contribution, or a thesis etc then the bibliography can actually be the most work:( -- Phillip Helbig Email ... [log in to unmask] Nuffield Radio Astronomy Laboratories Tel. ..... +44 1477 571 321 (ext. 297) Jodrell Bank Fax ................. +44 1477 571 618 Macclesfield Telex ................. 36149 JODREL G UK-Cheshire SK11 9DL Web .... http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/~pjh/