Using Pybliographic and Lyx for Citations and Bibliography Part 1

Lyx is an excellent and professional WYSIWYM word-processing software and in conjunction with open-source bibiliography software is invaluable for the serious writer.  There are many utilities for handling bibliography that can be used with Lyx.  The Lyx Wiki provides a list of platform-independent, Gnome, and KDE programs.

In this article, the Gnome-based Pybliographic is used with a standard openSUSE installation of Lyx in a KDE environment.  Although Pybliographic was designed for Gnome rather than KDE4, it works fine in openSUSE 12.1 though there are noticeable brief slow moments when opening programs such as Gwenview. 

Creating Entries in Pybliographic

1. Click the Add New Entry on the control panel of Pybliographic.

The Plus sign opens the add new entry box.

2. Before filling out any of the fields, select the appropriate source type from the Entry Type list.  The fields displayed are determined based on the entry type selected.  For example, the Book Entry Type has fields for Author, Editor, Publisher, etc.

The Entry Type and Key should be filled out first.

3. Enter a Key to identify the bibliographic entry from other entries (ie. a shortcut).  Pybliographic automates the creation of Keys by using the author's initials and the year.  For example, the entry for "Kafka on the Shore" by Haruki Murakami is assigned an HM94 key (the book was published in 1994). 

4. Fill out the Optional and Notes fields if necessary.  

5. New fields can be added by typing in the box provided and clicking on Create Field.  An extra tab labelled Extra will appear displaying any user-added fields.

6. Click Apply.
7. The bibliography entry will be listed on the top panel while details will be displayed in the bottom panel. 

Entries can be edited or deleted by right-clicking on the list.

8. Save the bibliography list by clicking File then Save As.  Select BibTeX as Bibliography type and do not forget to add the file extension .bib as the application does not add this by default.  Without the .bib extension it can, however, be opened using a text editor - though Pybliographic doesn't recognize it!

Do not forget to add the .bib file extension.

Exporting the Bibliographic Entries to HTML, Text, or Latex

1. Click Cite then Format.

2. Pybliographic provides several bibliography styles.  Click Browse and select from the list.  As a reference, take a look at the list below.

Bibliography Style	Entry Sequence	Sample
apa4e.xml	Author alphabetical	[KE04] Kay Ethier. (2004). XML and Framemaker. New York, NY 10013: Apress.
Alpha.xml	Author alphabetical	[KE04] Kay Ethier. XML and Framemaker, New York, NY 10013, 2004. Apress, New York, NY 10013, 2004.
abbrev	Author alphabetical	[KE04] Kay Ethier. XML and Framemaker, New York, NY 10013, 2004. Apress, New York, NY 10013, 2004.
abbrevau	Author alphabetical	[Kay, 2004] Kay Ethier. XML and Framemaker, New York, NY 10013, 2004. Apress, New York, NY 10013, 2004.
abbrvbib	Author alphabetical	[KE04] Kay Ethier. XML and Framemaker, New York, NY 10013, 2004. Apress, New York, NY 10013, 2004.
abbrvnum	As-is	[5] Kay Ethier. XML and Framemaker, New York, NY 10013, 2004. Apress, New York, NY 10013, 2004.

3. From the Format list, select HTML, Latex, or any of the text-based outputs.

4. Enter the output file name and location.

Besides exporting to text and HTML, the .bib file can be edited by any text-editing application such as Gedit or Kwrite.

Bibliographies exported to HTML can be used in web sites.