Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 10166
Reference/bibliography management is sorely lacking
Last modified: 2017-05-20 11:29:57 UTC
I am a scientist. My bread and butter are scientific papers and grant proposals. To do this writing absolutely requires proper attribution, full references. Openoffice/staroffice are of limited use to me and any scientist/academic/researcher because it lacks something that Word and Wordperfect have: reference management capability. Granted, the wordprocessors themselves do not contain this ability, but they do provide the handles necessary for superb applications like EndNote to use to handle the heavy lifting. The ONLY wordprocessor in the linux world that can do this is Lyx, or if you are particularly masochistic, straight LaTex with bibtex. I cannot emphasize this enough. The lack of the ability to insert references and generate reference pages for publication of professional scientific (or other research) papers renders Openoffice all but useless to academics, students and professors/techs alike. I only use Openoffice for minor tasks (letter writing or generation of curriculum vitae) and some presentations. If I want to write a scientific paper or proposal, I use Lyx. ALL my colleagues use Word or Wordperfect on the PC or Mac because of the availability of EndNote. The other day I gave an Impress presentation to some colleagues. They were intrigued by my use of linux for general purpose and, in particular, my use of Openoffice. They asked me questions about its usability, commented on its similarity to what they are familiar with on Windows or the Mac vis a vis Office, and asked me about my thoughts on it. These were potential adoptors. I ultimately had to tell them that the fact that neither Openoffice nor its sibling Staroffice can in any way properly manage references. Not itself and not through a third party app. Thus, I had to advise them against the application because it simply is not suited for scientific writing in any way. This is a shame and ultimately unnecessary. Openoffice and Staroffice COULD handle this critical function, either by providing handles or pipes the way Lyx, Word, and Wordperfect do (allowing the use of third party apps like pybliographic and Endnote respectively) or it could gain this function directly. The suite does have a bibliography function though it is ultimately useless. This function could/should be revamped, perhaps adopt bibtex as its native reference management method? Either build a pybliographic/EndNote capability into Openoffice directly or provide the pipes/handles so that third party developers could easily support Openoffice/Staroffice with their applications.
Reassigned to ES
Please evaluate
Set to "NEW"
Do we have a vote for OpenOffice issues ?? I have been searching the whole documentation for the last two hours because I simply couldn't *believe* that this wouldn't exist ! I would have set a bet on OpenOffice to have one ! Shame ! I tried so many ways around; at least you cracks at OpenOffice could possibly identify a work-around !? I couldn't even change the format of those End-numbers. They just come superscript, you select what you like. Give us at least some incremental, auto-numbering like [1], please !
Please be polite. The developers are doing a great deal and bibliography, even if crucial for a large class of users, still is not nearly as important for the new user as some other issues. However, it has been listed as "New" and not "Unconfirmed." Having said that, I would surely like it if it could be assigned to someone. I have to create bibliographies by hand and add them. The bibiliography feature of OOo is close to useless for many publisher's style sheets. There DOES need to be some kind of bibliography management program.
My excuses if I wasn't. Tend trying to be perfectionist, and would like everyone else to be same. Thanks for your agreement. I was just writing a paper, with 26 References only. Publisher requires specific format and I had to insert another reference, just after [1]. I said to myself that I won't possibly search and increment [2] to [3], [3] to [4], etc, until [26] is incremented into [27]. This should be done automatically, like in Numbering and Bullets, when you insert a new number after 1. (Maybe this makes it a bit clearer, what is required) Plus, the format must be user defined, just as in Numbering and Bullets. And a link must exist between that number and that same number on the References page. Many publishers expect citations like [Miller, 1998] or similar. Also then, this "Miller, 1998" needs to show up as a link on the References page. Otherwise, sorry, hopeless for scientific publications. So far I only found the superscript-numbers (no way to change the format) referring to either foot- or endnote. I was already finding myself experimenting with another section, with a *huge* footnote area containing all references as endnotes, but when I didn't find a way to change the format of those simple, superscript numbers, I gave up. So far I impressed (pun !) my colleagues and students pretty much with Open Office, but now I'm glad I haven't been too successful in my efforts. Please, please, add this feature, vote for it (I did already !), so that we can recommend Open Office in academia. Don't underestimate the multiplication factor ! - Thanks !
I agree that there must be a plug-in for Writer to work with Endnote and/or Reference Manager. Unfortunately, the above-mentioned software are not open source, nor they have linux versions; therefore the task is a little bit more complicated than building the plug-in. I realize the difficulty/impracticality to incorporate any reference management software/utility to the Open Office suite. However, any reference management utility embedded in Writer that is shorter than one with internet database (such as PubMed, Genome, etc.) search tools would not attract scientific community to the Open Office suite. I would personally rather use Crossover Office instead, to produce scientific papers. Thanks, hakova
Hi Mathias, I have changed the current owner to your owner. Please take the ownership of these enhancements.
While it would be very nice to have this functionality built-in, for now I have found Bibus. Bibus, though somewhat of a pain to setup, works much like EndNote with MS Word. It will use citation styles and generate the reference list/bibliography at the end of the document as with EndNote. Bibus CAN be somewhat temperamental to get running but once running works rather well.
I strongly recommend Zotero for this: http://zotero.org Zotero is an open-source citation manager that runs in Firefox and supports a bunch of proprietary formats. It offers OOo Writer integration that currently relies on an unsupported Basic plugin and has proven to be less than entirely robust, but I've been using it for months more or less happily. There is more robust OOo Writer integration in the works using a Python plugin that should be released shortly.
Reset assigne to the default "issues@openoffice.apache.org".