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Now that the amsrefs package for references has been available for a decade, how does it compare in popularity with Bibtex? Does there exist a pro and cons list for amsrefs?

Martin Peters
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  • I believe that amsref has a very small user base. A very interesting package, but it never took on. – egreg May 26 '15 at 13:23
  • The name of the package is amsrefs. It doesn't make much sense to compare it with an application like bibtex (which it can use too). You should compare it with packages like biblatex, natbib, jurabib ... – Ulrike Fischer May 26 '15 at 13:29
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    the name of the package is amsrefs, not amsref. @egreg is correct; its user base is mainly material published by the ams, although i know of a few other journals that accept its use. bibtex was very solidly entrenched before amsrefs was envisioned, and there were (sadly unrealized) hopes for its "completion". – barbara beeton May 26 '15 at 13:29

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@egreg's comment is correct; the user base for amsrefs is mainly material published by the ams, although i know of a few other journals that accept its use.

bibtex was very solidly entrenched before amsrefs was envisioned, and there were (sadly unrealized) hopes for its "completion".

there are, as far as i know, no formal pros/cons lists for amsrefs. one characteristic, which can be seen either as pro or con, depending on one's point of view, is that the data is fully embedded in the subject document (so it must be in the desired order of appearance).

more pro than con, i think: since the data elements are fully tagged, they can be used directly for generating structured references outside of the tex file, for example by being converted to [x|ht]ml.

barbara beeton
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I use amsrefs because I like to annotate my bibliographies, and that's much easier in the amsrefs structure. Publishers have never complained about my using it, although some have asked me to do some work getting the italics how they want, and such minutiae.

Kevin O'Bryant
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