The bibliography is the really hard part of writing a scientific publication, much harder than generating the data in the first place. This is why refdb tries to help you with this task as much as possible.
Before you go ahead and generate a bibliography you have to teach refdb about what the result should look like. While the default bibliography formatting of e.g. the DocBook or TEI stylesheets work just fine for many documents, it is clearly insufficient for scientific publications: There are literally thousands of possible combinations for the formatting of authors, titles, journal names, page and date informations, and almost each of these possiblilities has been adopted by at least one journal or publisher as the one and only citation and bibliography style. The format of the refdb bibliography styles is described in the first section. The next section will then explain how you generate bibliographies and format your documents.