Manuscript/Paper formatting

Manuscript formatting means to place markers in the document you are typing via a word processor and to format the paper exploiting those markers.

Markers are something like: (Alam 1992) that makes reference to the relevant record by Alam, and published in 1992, contained in your database. When you eventually format the paper, that marker can be transformed within the text, or footnote, into something like: (Alam, F. et al., 1992) or into (Alam et al., Boron Neutron Capture Therapy) or into (1), also the full reference can be printed in the bibliography reference list at the end of the paper.

Two great advantages:

We may even say that this has been the very reason to develop such a kind of software  in the early eighties, software that, consequently, we can still define bibliography formatting software. Developers (like prof. Victor Rosenberg author of ProCite) realized that a scholar might submit the same journal article to more than one journal's editorial board at the same time. It is almost the rule that different journals have their own different citations policy and styles. Scholars would appreciate not needing to change manually the output format of the references, either within the text or in the final reference list. Packages like these streamline the process: once the triangle works (1. references are properly stored in the database, 2. the output style is tuned, and 3. the markers are correct) the writer does not need to worry about changing style, formatting citations and bibliography.
Manuscript formatting is one main function that clearly distinguishes and serves to identify this family of software packages from the others: pure personal information managers, or generic databases, not to mention word processors or spreadsheets, are completely lacking it.
This is typically a procedure where details are countless, and incessantly increasing too, therefore we are not going to mention any of them (see for a detailed analysis: Manuscript formatting). It is notable that the market trend is to offer the user the possibility to stay within the document, and the wp, somehow 'calling' from it the references stored in the database to insert the markers and format the same document. This requires the developers to write third-party portions of codes in order to interact with a certain number of word processors. This is not always feasible, in this case markers are placed via a command given within the BMS or manually, the document is saved in one format (e.g. RTF) that can be read by the database and a formatted copy of it is eventually produced.
The whole procedure is so important that producers invest a lot of effort in improving its features at every release, at the same time users choose this kind of software product just because this function is available. Therefore this is likely to be an important factor in selecting a package.