At the outset of my PhD studies the importance of handling reference
material was clear.  Systems such as BibTeX would automatically
prepare the entries for a paper's reference section from the citations
included in the paper's text.  But to provide links between those
references, for historic, logical, or theme reasons required some
other method of handling this reference material.

Looking on the Internet showed no available software of the type
required.  I asked a question on the comp.text.tex usenet newsgroup in
regard to how others had addressed this problem, but received no
replies.  My conclusion was that to get such software I would have to
write it.  That software available only fulfilled paprt of my
requirements.  In the case of XBibTeX, the software was unstable, and
crashed without warning, resulting in loss of information entered
using it.  BibTool offered good promise, but it was not GUI orientated.