Final Examination

Preparation of academic papers involves not only the creative processes but also the more me-chanical tasks such as adjusting the form and style to suit the demands of the publishing journal or conference. Among several packages that help in these rather tedious mechanical tasks, the TEX + LATEX + BibTEX combination is extremely popular. This thesis is about tools that help in the nec-essary task of citing related work accurately. It focuses on three aspects of this larger bibliography frame work: (i) a survey of existing bibliography formats and tools, (ii) a database view of BibTEX files and functionality that ensues, and (iii) processing references given as free style pieces of text. Numerous tools that ease the citation task have been developed in the last five years. The thesis reviews thoroughly the 65 open source, and freeware tools, and somewhat less thoroughly the 18 commercial tools because of limitations of trial ware. These tools range from small stand-alone utilities of a couple of thousand lines of code to large suites of tools that evolved out of the research work of teams over a few years. Their functionality includes the collection of references and searching the various on-line bibliographies for full details and prepare them for inclusion in the references section typically found at the end of papers. We identify a few voids in functionality, especially dealing with free style references, and contribute new tools