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It would be really good to see some sort of support for using a BibTex database as a reference source in Mellel. I understand that Sente and Bookends are great reference managers, but there are also good reasons why someone might want to use another reference manager. Most will export to BibTex format, so if Mellel could read from a BibTex database, that would allow it to work with many other reference managers. I'm particularly interested in using Mendeley for its online and collaboration features. But it's impractical for Mellel to support dozens of different reference managers, so it would be good to at least get BibTex support.

http://www.mendeley.com

This would probably have to be paired with support for the Citation Style Language (CSL) to allow for selection within Mellel of how citations and bibliographies would appear. It seems to me that this would be a very flexible solution and very much in keeping with Mellel's high degree of formatting customisation (as well as taking advantage of the thousands of CSL definitions already out there).

http://citationstyles.org

Any chance of better reference manager support coming? I feel like the world of reference managers has moved on and Mellel is stuck where it started.

Thanks,
Jolin

"It would be really good to see some sort of support for using a BibTex database as a reference source in Mellel. I understand that Sente and Bookends are great reference managers, but there are also good reasons why someone might want to use another reference manager. Most will export to BibTex format, so if Mellel could read from a BibTex database, that would allow it to work with many other reference managers."


Yes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The issue with direct bibtex support in Mellel is that Mellel would then be responsible for formatting the bibliography and citations. The Redlers would have to write a module from scratch to handle all the complexity of flexible formatting for different journals. Personally I would prefer they leave that to the experts (i.e. the software designed to do only that), and spend their small resources elsewhere.

Probably every reference manager needs a custom plugin to integrate with a particular word processor. I would also prefer that the Redlers spend their time improving Mellel, and not writing plugins for every reference manager out there. (I know that's not what you were suggesting).

DRM

DylanMuir wrote:"Probably every reference manager needs a custom plugin to integrate with a particular word processor. I would also prefer that the Redlers spend their time improving Mellel, and not writing plugins for every reference manager out there."

Of course. But we want only one plugin for one free reference manager: Bibdesk, Zotero, Mendeley. With import/export one of them allows to use the others. Mendeley evan can sync automatically with Zotero. Zotero and Mendeley can scan and format. I vote for a Zotero plugin for it have more users. But a plugin for any of these free reference managers make me happy. Not all of us have the money for buy Bookends or Sente. Zotero and Mendeley are very good and free and many people use them. Without fail: one plugin for one of the important free reference managers is enough.