Many institutions require their documents to conform to a specific Style Convention, which covers aspects of document format, including the styles of bibliographic tables and citations. [Citation: a short note recognizing a source of information or of a quoted passage.] There are a number of Style Conventions: these include MLA, ASA, PSA, Harvard, Chicago. These different styles differ in the way in which they present citations and references for different types of source documents, such as books, articles, journals, collections etc. If a document has been written with one Style Convention it is a laborious task to convert all these references to another style. The ideal would be a fully automated method of conversion. This project is working towards that.

LaTeX, with BibTeX, is the standard word processor in mathematics and the hard sciences. It can handle many types of bibliographic style conversions. OpenOffice will have to emulate LaTeX/BibTeX's flexibility in bibliographic styles (and in mathematic equations) if it is to gain acceptance in that field.

OpenOffice's current bibliographic functions are limited. At present there are two loosely coupled bibliographic components. One is the old StarOffice 5.2 Bibliographic database (dbase format) [screen image]. It has a simple reference insertion process. When an database bibliographic entry is dragged onto a document, a dialog box opens which allows the fields required for the entry to be selected [screen image]. This process can be configured for only one citation format in one citation style - eg book reference for MLA - and it does not support character formatting of fields, such as italic or underlining. The bibliographic database cannot import or export data in acceptable formats for other bibliographic applications.

The other component is new in OpenOffice. It stores bibliographic data within the document. The data is entered through 'Insert >Indexes and Tables> Bibliographic Entry' function, and bibliographic tables can be generated from it [screen image]. The new facility can also access the old bibliographic database. It allows Bibliographic citations to be selected either from the bibliographic database or from the 'document content' and inserted into the document. Selecting the 'From document content' option and pressing the New button adds bibliographic references as hidden fields. A Bibliographic Table can be inserted that utilised the citations from the database and / or the 'document content' . The format of the Bibliographic Table can be finely controlled (it has character formatting) and this is a very good piece of design and implementation [screen image]. However, the citation and table field definitions can be set up to support only one Style Convention. To reset the table definitions for a different style is a laborious exercise.

Another limitation is that only the in-text author-date [wilson2002] and the endnote forms of citation are supported: the footnote style is not supported. Another important limitation is that there is no capacity for in-document bibliographic data to be easily imported or exported. Nor can data be transferred between the internal document storage and the old database.

For more details see A detailed list of OpenOffice bibliographic deficiencies.