Even more pedantic: they do create the BibTeX entries (by assembling existing elements in BibTeX format), but they do not conjure up the elements of information without manual intervention (eg typing or custom import).

As yet there’s been little clamor for a replacement: BibTeX is fine for the citation styles natural scientists and most social scientists use, and they still make up the overwhelming majority of TeX users. I’d conjecture that, as more and more humanists take up TeX, there will eventually emerge a new bibliographic system suited to their needs, while the scientists continue to use BibTeX.

Based on des von bladet’s and your posts, bza, is BibTeX fundamentally separate from but integrated into the TeX system, or do BibTeX’s flaws stem from TeX flaws? Could one create an entirely separate bibliographic system that hooked into TeX/LaTeX?

There’s the Oxford Guide to Style, which I really wish hadn’t been retitled. It used to called something like Oxford Rules for Readers and Compositors, which was so English and plummy it’s a shame to have lost it.

Have you looked at the BibTeX langwidge itself, persons? Spastic baboons would weep hot hot tears of shame to have perpetrated such a something.

Amen. Although the problems go beyond the heinousness of a stack-based language. (For instance, you can’t reliably do multiple levels of inclusion, which prevents you from adequately representing, say, an essay contained in one volume of a multi-volume set. Or again: when processing one item you can’t access information in another item unless the latter contains the former. This prevents proper implementation of several Chicago rules.) But as I suggested above, I think the workflow model that BibTeX is based on is—for the humanitites—fundamentally flawed, so a successor shouldn’t just try to repair these sorts of defects.

A kind of pedantic point: People bringing up Emacs’s BibTeX mode and specialized BibTeX database managers are misunderstanding Ben Wolfson’s question. Those utilities don’t create the entries for you; they just help you manage information that you input manually.

To answer somebody’s question, there are women who use fountain pens; my partner is one of them. I would opine that the fetish aspect of fountain pens appeals to an almost exclusively male audience. Most of the female users of fountain pens that I know are primarily interested in writing more easily.