Reference management

I built up a sizable reference library in Endnote, and I wanted to continue to use it to write my thesis in LaTeX. Although Endnote can create a BibTeX reference library, for some reason it will not export the reference numbers used to mark temporary in-text citations, and can't automatically generate decent alternative labels.

To make the integration between Endnote and LaTeX easier, I wrote a couple of Python scripts to generate citation labels (endnlib.py) and replace temporary Endnote citations with BibTeX-style citations (texref.py).

I recently (May, 2004) re-wrote these scripts to use the optparse module (instead of my cp.py), which should make these scripts ok for *NIX and Windows platforms running Python 2.3.x. See the software page to get these scripts. In addition Dan Burns has kindly generated and tested a precompiled windows executable for machines without python installed. Please contact him at (danburns [at] mit.edu) for questions about running this software on a WIndows platform.

Here's a detailed howto in pdf for download or html.

UNC PhD Thesis stylesheet

I have written my Ph.D. thesis using LaTeX. This was made possible by a UNC Chapel Hill thesis style sheet created by Wolfgang Resch, a former grad student in the lab. I have updated this stylesheet to comply with UNC grad school requirements as of May 2003.

I used the natbib package for in text citations, but I had to modify the stylesheet slightly (I added a single line) to generate a properly-formatted bibliograpghy. Here is the required modification (look around line 450 of natbib.sty):

   \newcommand\NAT@bibsetnum[1]{\settowidth\labelwidth{\@biblabel{#1}}%
   \setlength{\leftmargin}{\labelwidth}\addtolength{\leftmargin}{\labelsep}%
   
   %%% modification by NH: permits bibhang adjustment with numbered format
   \addtolength{\leftmargin}{\bibhang}\setlength{\itemindent}{-\bibhang}%
   %%% end modification
   
   \setlength{\itemsep}{\bibsep}\setlength{\parsep}{\z@}%
   \ifNAT@openbib
     \addtolength{\leftmargin}{\bibindent}%
     \setlength{\itemindent}{-\bibindent}%
     \setlength{\listparindent}{\itemindent}%
     \setlength{\parsep}{0pt}%
   \fi
   }

\usepackage[round, sort, numbers]{natbib_unc} % refers to modified stylesheet
\bibliographystyle{plainnat} % STYLE = {plainnat, abbrvnat, unsrtnat}
\setlength{\bibhang}{5ex} % indent 2nd and subsequent lines by 5 spaces