BibTeX .bst style for Geological Society of America publications

I spent the past couple of hours figuring this out, and figured that others might benefit from it. If you find it useful or if you find problems with it, please leave a comment here.

The file: http://mail.rochester.edu/~chacker/gsa.bst

This gets you references that look like this:

Dewey, J.F. and Bird, J.M., 1970, Mountain belts and the new global tectonics: Journal of Geophysical Research, v. 75, p. 2625–2647.

It's proper Geological Society of America-style references, as in journals like GSA Bulletin and Geology, in BibTeX and LaTeX. Note that it's only really set up for journal articles; if you have other types of references, which I suppose is possible, it may or may not give correct output.

BibTeX is a pretty good open-source alternative to EndNote. Though EndNote might be easier to use (at least, easier to get set up I presume), it does not run on Linux, and it costs money. The proprietary, expensive nature of software like that leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

BibTeX is the reference database format of LaTeX. I now use the LaTeX frontend LyX, managing my reference database with pybliographer.

I originally created my reference database with WIKINDX, a web-based bibliography manager that I ran off of localhost. WIKINDX works pretty well and has a built-in word processor; but as you can imagine for a web-based app the word processor is quite limited, and there is no integration with external word processors. It seems like it could be a good way to manage a reference database to be used by multiple people, allowing easy collaboration on documents. I don't really need that, and I prefer a non-web-based solution. It exports to BibTeX format, though, so I didn't have to build my database again.

There are several applications designed for managing BibTeX databases, but for some reason none of them seem to have very active developers. I settled on pybliographer because it seems to work (though it is a gnome app and I use KDE so it looks a little weird to me). There is a comparison and list of reference database software on wikipedia; of those pybliographer is the best for what I need, for others it may be different.

I can now write my documents in LyX, which as a LaTeX frontend uses my BibTeX database internally to manage citations seamlessly. LyX is pretty great because it does all the formatting and typesetting for you (in whichever way you specify, of course) so once you figure out how it works you can focus on the writing and not the formatting. That is the most annoying thing to deal with when writing documents in Word or OpenOffice - formatting things the way you want is always a struggle.