A posting from Markus Hoenicka announces a new release of RefDB for bibliographic database management. RefDB is a "reference database and bibliography tool for markup languages; it helps you to keep track of the publications you read and allows you to automatically create bibliographies in your SGML, XML, or LaTeX documents. The citations and bibliographies can be formatted according to the specifications of a particular journal or publisher. RefDB currently supports document types and stylesheets based upon DocBook SGML (DSSSL), DocBook XML (DSSSL or XSL), and TEI XML (XSL). Further document types can be added without modifying RefDB itself. Using RefDB one may create HTML, PostScript, PDF, DVI, MIF, or RTF output from DocBook or TEI sources with fully formatted citations and bibliographies according to a publisher's specifications. RefDB is a client/server system which was specifically designed to allow sharing of databases in workgroups or departments, although it runs just as well on a standalone workstation. RefDB currently runs on Linux, FreeBSD, and Windows/Cygwin, but other Unices most likely work as well. RefDB is released under the GPL and available for free."

How RefDB works: "You create citations in your source document (<xref> in DocBook, <ptr> in TEI) that specify in an attribute which reference from the database (and from which database) you wish to cite. RefDB creates a <bibliography> (DocBook) or <div> (TEI) element which you can insert as an external entity in your document. This external entity contains all linkends to the citations that you created. RefDB also creates a customized stylesheet driver file which contains specific formatting information for the chosen citation and bibliography style. Finally you can transform your document with Jade or an XSLT processor, using the custom driver file, to obtain a document with the citations and the bibliography formatted according to the publisher's specs. It supports all common citation styles (author-year, numbered), author-only and year-only citations, all sorts of bibliography sorting and formatting." [from the announcement]

Changes in version 0.8.2: This version of RefDB adds a number of important features. First of all, DocBook XML and TEI XML documents are now supported. The RefDB package contains the corresponding driver files for the standard DocBook and TEI XSL stylesheets. The runbib shell script was adapted accordingly, and a new script refdbxml was added for the transformation of the XML documents to HTML or PDF output. The CiteStyle XML DTD, the bibliography output, and the stylesheets were changed to accomodate additional citation styles. In addition to the traditional style (Miller et al., 1999), you can now also write: Miller et al. reported recently (1999)... You can now also specify month names and abbreviations in the citation style XML documents. This improves formatting of bibliographies for publications using a different language than English. Finally, support for the SGML versions of the CiteStyle DTD and the CitationList DTD was dropped. Now the XML versions are authoritative."