Online searches in bibliographic data bases yield bibliographic references in a format which is not directly suitable for use in manuscripts. Several commercial programs are available (e.g., Reference Manager or VCH Biblio) which allow import and export of bibliographic data. However, the BibTeX system and accompanying tools (e.g., bibview) offer an attractive and powerful alternative (for free).
A Perl script stn2biblio.pl has been written here for the conversion of bibliographic STN references (BIB format) to the SGML biblio DTD (which is part of the qwertz package), BibTeX, Unix refer/grefer or NLM format. (Unix refer with the lookbib/glookbib or lkbib tools offers a simple way of searching private bibliographic data bases.) The SGML biblio format in turn may be converted to BibTeX, refer, PostScript or ASCII text; by means of the script biblio2html.pl, HTML output can also be generated.