The command nbibtex can be used just as you would use bibtex. Your \cite{...} commands are interpreted either as classic BibTeX keys (for backward compatibility) or as search commands. Thus, if your bibliography contains the classic paper on type inference, nbibtex should find it using a citation like \cite{damas-milner:1978}, or \cite{damas-milner:polymorphism}, or perhaps even simply \cite{damas-milner}. The same citations should also work with your coauthors' bibliographies, even if those bibliographies are organized differently.
NbibTeX also comes with the nbibfind command, which uses the NbibTeX search engine on the command line. If you know you are looking for a paper by Harper and Moggi, you can just type
nbibfind harper-moggiand see what comes out.
To help you work with coauthors who don't have NbibTeX, nbibtex can also emit a .bib file containing exactly the entries cited in your paper.
nbibtex paper
nbibtex -permissive papernbibtex will cheerfully ignore any missing bibliographies.
nbibtex -permissive -bib -o paper.bib paper paper yoursThis command line tells nbibtex to emit a .bib file (-bib) to file paper.bib, based on citations found in paper.aux (first paper) and using BibTeX entries found in either paper.bib (second paper) or in yours.bib. Because of the -permissive option, it is OK if paper.bib is missing. With paper.bib in place, you and your coauthors can all use classic BibTeX:
bibtex paper
deb http://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/debian ./ deb-src http://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/debian ./To prevent apt-get from complaining that the package comes from an untrusted source, you can use apt-key to bless my private key:
curl -o nrkey.txt http://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/gpgkey.txt sudo apt-key add nrkey.txt
With these preliminaries out of the way, you can simply
apt-get install nbibtex
showpaper damas-milnerThese scripts aren't really ready for prime time, but if you want to play, send email.