There are multiple applications and web sites that can export BibTeX citations such as Google Scholar, ACM Digital Library, Mendeley and Bibsonomy. Unfortunately, there are two major problems:
- the quality of the entries is low and often has to be manually corrected or expanded
- each journal or conference has its own expectations on which optional attributes are shown (e.g. editors, location) and how to format them. For the proceedings of the WWW 2010 conference it could be "Proc. of WWW 2010", "Proceedings of the 19th Int. World Wide Web Conference", or the actual title of the book that contains those proceedings.
- as it looks bad when a reference has only one or two words on a new line, optional attributes should be used on a case by case basis, if that is allowed
All this effort has to be done by every author for every new publication, possibly even twice if you change where you want to publish and I find it hopelessly inefficient for this day and age.
Is there some solution which works around all of this? I imagine some kind of database which has "style" entries for each publication target and multiple values for some fields depending on the style, e.g. a proceedings shortname, long name and so forth. Then you just specify the publications along with the style and get a customary output. Does this exist somewhere?
