refer is a program for managing bibliographic references, and citing them in
troff
troff (), short for "typesetter roff", is the major component of a document processing system developed by Bell Labs for the Unix operating system. troff and the related nroff were both developed from the original roff (software), roff.
Whil ...
,
nroff, and
groff documents. It is implemented as a
preprocessor
In computer science, a preprocessor (or precompiler) is a Computer program, program that processes its input data to produce output that is used as input in another program. The output is said to be a preprocessed form of the input data, which i ...
.
refer was written by
Mike Lesk
Michael E. Lesk (born 1945) is an American computer scientist.
Biography
In the 1960s, Michael Lesk worked for the SMART Information Retrieval System project, wrote much of its retrieval code and did many of the retrieval experiments, as well as ...
at
Bell Laboratories
Nokia Bell Labs, commonly referred to as ''Bell Labs'', is an American industrial research and development company owned by Finnish technology company Nokia. With headquarters located in Murray Hill, New Jersey, the company operates several lab ...
[Michael Lesk. Some applications of inverted indexes on the Unix system. In ''UNIX Programmer's manual: Supplementary Documents'', volume 2. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, seventh edition, 1982. Also available onlin]
/ref>Unix-like
A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X, *nix or *NIX) operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, although not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Uni ...
operating systems. A free reimplementation exists as part of the groff package.
, refer sees little use, primarily because troff itself is not used much for longer technical writing that might need software support for reference and citation management. , some reference management software (for instance, RefWorks) will import refer data.
Example
refer works with a "reference file", a text file where the author lists works to which they might want to refer. One such reference, to an article in a journal in this case, might look like:
%A Brian W. Kernighan
%A Lorinda L. Cherry
%T A System for Typesetting Mathematics
%J J. Comm. ACM
%V 18
%N 3
%D March 1978
%P 151-157
%K eqn
The author then can refer to it in their troff, groff, or nroff document by listing keywords which uniquely match this reference:
. kernighan cherry eqn
.
Database fields
A refer bibliographic database is a text file consisting of a series of records, separated by one or more blank lines. Within each record, each field starts with a at the beginning of the line and one character immediately after. The name of the field should be followed by exactly one space, and then by the contents of the field. Empty fields are ignored. The conventional meaning of each field is shown in the table below. Compare this scheme with the newer EndNote scheme which uses a similar syntax.
See also
Data schemes
* – a text-based data format used by LaTeX
* – a similar, but not identical, data scheme used by the EndNote program
* RIS – a text-based data scheme from Research Information Systems
Other
* Comparison of reference management software
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.
General
In the "notes" section, there is a difference betw ...
* Pybliographer
References
External links
Some Applications of Inverted Indexes on the UNIX System
(PostScript
PostScript (PS) is a page description language and dynamically typed, stack-based programming language. It is most commonly used in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm, but as a Turing complete programming language, it c ...
)
man page for refer(1)
{{reference management software
Refer
Refer
Bibliography file formats