Supported formats

Bibliography formats

BibTeX

BibTeX is the default bibliography format used by Pybtex:

@BOOK{strunk-and-white,
    author = "Strunk, Jr., William and E. B. White",
    title = "The Elements of Style",
    publisher = "Macmillan",
    edition = "Third",
    year = 1979
}

Some links:

• A basic description of the BibTeX format.

• An in-depth description of the quirky BibTeX syntax.

BibTeXML

BibTeXML is an attempt to translate the BibTeX format into XML. The above BibTeX snippet translates into this XML:

<bibtex:entry id="strunk-and-white">
    <bibtex:book>
        <bibtex:author>
            <bibtex:person>
                <bibtex:first>William</bibtex:first>
                <bibtex:last>Strunk</bibtex:last>
                <bibtex:lineage>Jr.</bibtex:lineage>
            </bibtex:person>
            <bibtex:person>
                <bibtex:first>E.</bibtex:first>
                <bibtex:middle>B.</bibtex:first>
                <bibtex:last>White</bibtex:last>
            </bibtex:person>
        </bibtex:author>
        <bibtex:title>The Elements of Style</bibtex:title>
        <bibtex:publisher>Macmillan<bibtex:publisher>
        <bibtex:edition>Third</bibtex:edition>
        <bibtex:year>1979</bibtex:year>
    </bibtex:book>
</bibtex:entry>

YAML

We added our own experimental YAML-based bibliography format to Pybtex. It is mostly a straightforward translation of BibTeXML into YAML:

strunk-and-white:
    type: book
    author:
        - first: William
          last: Strunk
          lineage: Jr.
        - first: E.
          middle: B.
          last: White
    title: The Elements of Style
    publisher: Macmillan
    edition: Third
    year: 1979

Bibliography style formats

Pybtex currently supports bibliography styles in two formats:

• BibTeX’ .bst files

• Pybtex’ Pythonic styles

Output formats

BibTeX’s .bst styles usually contain hardcoded LaTeX markup and are LaTeX-only. Pythonic styles in Pybtex are markup-independent and can output multiple formats, including:

• LaTeX

• Markdown

• HTML

• plain text

There is also pybtex-docutils by Matthias Troffaes that integrates Pybtex with Docutils, and sphinxcontrib-bibtex by the same author, integrating Pybtex with Sphinx.