Dr. Andrew Broad
Computer Science
Perl
REF

Welcome to REF, a system to help humans keep track of bibliographical information.

• You store information about books, journals, conference proceedings, Internet resources &c. in a file which REF can read.
• You give the program a query (a form where you fill in the blanks).
• It retrieves references which match that query.
• It outputs those references in standard bibliography format (as an HTML file).

This takes a lot of the hassle out of making a bibliography if you update your bibliography file as you go along. It also helps you to adhere to the two key qualities of a bibliography:

1. It contains the right information.
2. Its style is consistent.

REF encourages you to associate more information with a reference than is needed to generate an entry in a bibliography for it. Information such as where to find it and what publications you have cited it in are very useful, and above all a list of keywords that describe what the reference is about will prove very useful if you know you read about something somewhere but can't remember quite where - REF will help you to find the reference.

Documentation

User Guide

Download REF

The program is written in Perl 5 and was developed on a Sun running UNIX. Since it generates bibliographies in HTML, these are best viewed using your web browser.

Program Source Code

Sample Bibliography File

Sample Output Bibliography