Chapter 2.  Introduction

About KBibTeX

KBibTeX is an integrated environment for creating and editing bibliographies in BibTEX format. KBibTeX gives you the ability to use all the functionalities of BibTEX in a graphical interface, giving you easy, immediate, and customized access to local and online bibliographies with ability of entries completing, compiling, previewing and searching.

About BibTEX

BibTEX is a program and file format designed by Oren Patashnik and Leslie Lamport in 1985 for the LATEX document preparation system [Lamport86].

The format is entirely character based, so it can be used by any program (although the standard character set for accents is TEX). It is field (tag) based and the BibTEX program will ignore unknown fields, so it is expandable. It is probably the most common format for bibliographies on the Internet.

The BibTEX program uses style files, a list of citations from LATEX, and a BibTEX database to create a LATEX file listing the cited references. The idea of style files is that final copy in any journal-specific form can be done automatically.

An example of BibTEX database entry:

@article{PAM_doi:10.1007/BF00048294,
	author = {Streitenberger, P. and Knott, John F.},
	doi = {10.1007/BF00048294},
	issn = {1573-2673},
	journal = {{International Journal of Fracture}},
	number = {3},
	pages = {R49},
	publisher = {Springer},
	title = {{The calculation of crack opening area and crack opening volume from stress intensity factors}},
	url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF00048294},
	volume = {76},
	x-fetchedfrom = {SpringerLink},
	year = {1995}
}

KBibTeX and LATEX Editors

LATEX code can be edited with a wide variety of tools from simple minimalistic text editors to powerful visual suites. For the comparison of LATEX editors, see this page.

KBibTeX provides out-of-box integration with Kile and LyX though it can be successfully used with any kind of LATEX editor.