Having a well-managed bibliographic collection scheme and an efficient citation system are valuable in research communities. Current bibliography management systems are limited in the sense that they are application-oriented or even word-processor oriented, such as WinBibDb for LaTeX and EndNote for MicroSoft Word. Since article writers may want to add remarks to the bibliography, such as critical formula or context associated with the related entry, a bibliography management system should be flexible enough to deal with the bibliography construction and usage.

As more and more publishers requesting their own XML formats for publication, together with the open feature of XML and Internet accessibility, we propose an open XML-based Bibliography Management System (XBMS). With XBMS, an author can freely compose an article with his favorite editors, efficiently utilize the citation service, and automatically generate the desired document format, such as PDF, TeX, or other XML format. There are four phases in XBMS workflow of processing: editing phase, validating phase, associating phase, and transformation phase. In this paper, both tree language and tree automata of XBMS are described to model the operation of automatic bibliography association. We also present an implementation of XBMS using popular XML parser, Xerces, and XSLT processor, Xalan, and give an example to demonstrate its feasibility.