refer (software)

refer is a program for managing bibliographic references, and citing them in troff documents. It is implemented as a troff preprocessor.

refer was written by Mike Lesk at Bell Laboratories in or before 1978, and is now available as part of most Unix-like operating systems. A free reimplementation exists as part of the groff package.

refer works with a reference file, a text file where the author lists works to which she might want to refer. One such reference (to an article in a journal in this case) might look like:

%A Brian W. Kernighan
%A Lorinda L. Cherry
%T A System for Typesetting Mathematics
%J J. Comm. ACM
%V 18
%N 3
%D March 1978
%P 151-157
%K eqn

The author then can refer to it in her troff document by listing keywords which uniquely match this reference:

.[
kernighan cherry eqn
.]

refer sees little use today, primarily because troff itself is not used much for longer technical writing that might need software support for reference and citation management.

See also

• Comparison of reference management software
• Pybliographer

External links

• Some Applications of Inverted Indexes on the UNIX System (PostScript)
• man page for refer(1)
• Extended refer code reference for the HCI bibliography database