Publishing and processing scientific documents leads to an ever growing collection of bibliographic references, most commonly BibTeX-entries, which quickly becomes a mess when not properly organized.

This can be a tedious and time-consuming task when done by hand, and tends to be always out-of-date nonetheless. Further there is the need to publish an entire BibTeX-bibliography as well as just a subset.

Numerous tools for keeping a tidy bibliography exist, which fulfill their intended purpose, so do tools that care for exporting entire BibTeX-files to a range of different formats, like HTML, XML and such.

Unfortunately these tools cannot be used to process only a subset and further are only suitable to perform either management or conversion.

The intent for creating Bib2x was to have a tool with named features and at the same time provide flexibility and extendibility.

Bib2x enables filtering on a set of bibliographic entries read from BibTeX databases and allows entirely user-defined export to arbitrary file formats using templates.