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MS word citations file formats etc.

  1. There is one citations file called Sources.xml, created after you add your first citation
  2. On Mac the location is ~/Documents/Microsoft User Data (see here for windows specific info)
  3. There is a paucity of documentation on the format (so surprising, no?) but various people have put effort into understanding it:
    1. Straight forward code on one page for a bibtex to xml conversion.
    2. Some one's journal of reverse engineering the xml format. 
    3. bibutils - command line tools to convert citations between various formats
    4. BibTex -> citation converter by Joonhwan Lee (closed source, free)

In short, while MS Word has wasted time and effort reinventing the wheel (and doing so badly) at least the format is text based. Really, all we need to do is convert our PIs to using LyX and we don't have to deal with this %$#@@ any more!
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