Amsrefs is a package for preparing bibliographic lists. If, like me, you use bibtex then you may find this post informative. If you enter your bibliographic items into the tex file manually, \emph-asizing titles and consulting Chicago Manual of Style to check whether the publisher should appear before or after the publication year then please have mercy on your co-authors and start eating with fork and knife. You spill typos all over the place.
So I have tried using amsrefs recently. Pro: Bibliographic items are entered in the tex file using a command similar to \bibitem, no need to keep a separate bib file and running bibtex. This is more convenient, especially if your folders are as messy as mine. Cons: Bibliographic items are not sorted, they appear in the pdf in the same order they appear in the tex file. Worse, all the entries in your bibliographic list appear in the pdf document, even those you don’t cite in the main text. The referee will search for their name, find the paper in the list of references, then search for the citation and get pissed when it’s not there: apparently you know about their paper but have nothing to say about it. Another con: You are in charge of capitalization of the journal and paper titles. Chicago Manual of Style anybody ?
Bottom line: I think I will return to bibtex. Am I missing anything ?
The Leisure of the Theory Class 
1 comment
March 9, 2011 at 1:52 pm
Sergei Yakovenko
Pro: you don’t have to maintain large bibtex files. All you need you get straight from MathSciNet. You can forget the names you’ve given to the items in your Main Bibliography File… you can safely move from one laptop to another once in 3-5 years without leaving too much behind.
Another pro: a single file submitted to the publisher. With bibtex, you need to comment out the “genuine” citations and paste in the .bbl file which may change if you add just one more reference.
Con: absence of automatic sorting and the frills.
Bottom line: I am still vacillating between the two options ;-)