LaTeX is a software system for typesetting documents. LaTeX markup describes the content and layout of the document, as opposed to the formatted text found in WYSIWYG word processors like Google Docs, LibreOffice Writer, and Microsoft Word. The writer uses markup tagging conventions to define the general structure of a document, to stylize text throughout a document, and to add citations and cross-references. A TeX distribution such as TeX Live or MiKTeX is used to produce an output file suitable for printing or digital distribution.
BibTeX is both a bibliographic flat-file database file format and a software program for processing these files to produce lists of references (citations). The BibTeX file format is a widely used standard with broad support by reference management software.
In computing, touch is a command used to update the access date and/or modification date of a computer file or directory. It is included in Unix and Unix-like operating systems, TSC's FLEX, Digital Research/Novell DR DOS, the AROS shell, the Microware OS-9 shell, and ReactOS. The command is also available for FreeDOS and Microsoft Windows.
XeTeX is a TeX typesetting engine using Unicode and supporting modern font technologies such as OpenType, Graphite and Apple Advanced Typography (AAT). It was originally written by Jonathan Kew and is distributed under the X11 free software license.
CiteULike was a web service which allowed users to save and share citations to academic papers. Based on the principle of social bookmarking, the site worked to promote and to develop the sharing of scientific references amongst researchers. In the same way that it is possible to catalog web pages or photographs, scientists could share citation information using CiteULike. Richard Cameron developed CiteULike in November 2004 and in 2006 Oversity Ltd. was established to develop and support CiteULike. In February 2019, CiteULike announced that it would be ceasing operations as of March 30, 2019.
FontForge is a FOSS font editor which supports many common font formats. Developed primarily by George Williams until 2012, FontForge is free software and is distributed under a mix of the GNU General Public License Version 3 and the 3-clause BSD license. It is available for operating systems including Linux, Windows, and macOS, and is localized into 12 languages.
JabRef is an open-source, cross-platform citation and reference management software. It is used to collect, organize and search bibliographic information.
EndNote is a commercial reference management software package, used to manage bibliographies and references when writing essays, reports and articles. EndNote was written by Richard Niles, and ownership changed hands several times since it was launched in 1989 by Niles & Associates: in 2000 it was acquired by Institute for Scientific Information’s ResearchSoft Division, part of Thomson Corporation, and in 2016 by Clarivate. EndNote's main competitors are Mendeley and Zotero. Unlike Mendeley and Zotero, EndNote is neither free-to-use nor offers a freemium model.
Zotero is free and open-source reference management software to manage bibliographic data and related research materials, such as PDF and ePUB files. Features include web browser integration, online syncing, generation of in-text citations, footnotes, and bibliographies, integrated PDF, ePUB and HTML readers with annotation capabilities, and a note editor, as well as integration with the word processors Microsoft Word, LibreOffice Writer, and Google Docs. It was originally created at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University and, as of 2021, is developed by the non-profit Corporation for Digital Scholarship.
The following tables compare notable reference management software. The comparison includes older applications that may no longer be supported, as well as actively-maintained software.
The Citation Style Language (CSL) is an open XML file format that describes schema for the formatting of citations and bibliographies. Reference management programs using CSL include Zotero, Mendeley and Papers. The Pandoc lightweight document conversion system also supports citations in CSL, YAML, and JSON formats and can render these using any of the CSL styles listed in the Zotero Style Repository.
MacTeX is a free redistribution of TeX Live, a typesetting environment based on TeX. While TeX Live is designed to be cross-platform, MacTeX includes Mac-specific utilities and front-ends. It is also pre-configured to work out-of-the-box with macOS, as it provides sensible defaults for configuration options that, in TeX Live, are left up to the user to allow for its cross-platform compatibility.
CiteProc is the generic name for programs that produce formatted bibliographies and citations based on the metadata of the cited objects and the formatting instructions provided by Citation Style Language (CSL) styles. The first CiteProc implementation used XSLT 2.0, but implementations have been written for other programming languages, including JavaScript, Java, Haskell, PHP, Python, Ruby and Emacs Lisp.
WIKINDX is a free bibliographic and quotations/notes management and article authoring system designed either for single use and multi-user collaborative use across the internet. WIKINDX falls within the category of reference management software, but also provides functionality to write notes and entire papers.
Bebop is a web-based BibTeX front-end that creates a web interface to a list of publications stored in a BibTeX file and allows browsing by author, year, document type, topic and keywords using PHP, JavaScript and XML technologies. It can be mainly used by individuals and institutes for self-archiving and creating institutional repositories.
Biber is a bibliography information processing program that works in conjunction with the LaTeX package BibLaTeX and offers full Unicode support.
Citavi is a reference management and knowledge organization program for Microsoft Windows published by Swiss Academic Software in Wädenswil, Switzerland. There is also an interface called Citavi Web which can be used on a Mac. Citavi is widely used in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, with site licenses at most universities, many of which offer training sessions and settings files for Citavi.
Pandoc is a free-software document converter, widely used as a writing tool and as a basis for publishing workflows. It was created by John MacFarlane, a philosophy professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
Paperpile is a web-based commercial reference management software, with special emphasis on integration with Google Docs and Google Scholar. Parts of Paperpile are implemented as a Google Chrome browser extension. It was founded in 2012, and is produced by Paperpile LLC.
Zettlr is a free and open-source note-taking application that works with Markdown files. Files may be exported and imported from a variety of different formats using an integration with Pandoc, whilst integration with reference managers allows for insertion of citations into documents. Internal links may be created between notes, which can be visualised as a graph, enabling its use as a personal information management system or digital Zettelkasten. The name Zettlr is derived from the German word Zettel meaning 'note'.
