These are the essential steps to publish SGML or XML documents with formatted citations and a formatted bibliography:
Load one or more bibliography styles into the common refdb database, using the addstyle command.
Prepare your source document by declaring an external entity containing the bibliography in the header and by including a reference to this entity in the proper place of your document.
Insert citations into your document, preferrably using the short notation.
Preprocess your document using refdbxp (not required if you use the full notation for citations).
Use runbib to create the bibliography as an external entity.
Use either refdbjade or refdbxml to transform your document to the desired output format.
Note: The last three steps can be run conveniently from a Makefile generated by the refdbnd tool. See the description of the refdbnd-generated Makefile below.