Roland Winkler <winkler@gnu.org> writes:

>>> When does this happen?  To the best of my knowledge, this has never been
>>> an issue for users of bibtex.el.
>>
>> It is more of a hypothetical scenario that might occur in future if Org
>> tries to support bibliographies provided inside .org files. Such
>> bibliographies will need to be converted to .bib files transiently and
>> might not need to be saved on disk.
>
> This sounds to me like reinventing the wheel and a poor design choice.
> BibTeX is a well-established bibliography format with a large ecosystem
> [(La)TeX].  Also, publishers provide BibTeX records for their journal
> articles.  (Occassionally I need to deal with records that have some
> other database format like RIS.  Converting formats is always painful.)
> ...
> What are the usage scenarios you have in mind for putting a bibliography
> database into org mode that comes with its own database format?

Org mode provides transparent conversion between BibTeX and Org formats.

The advantages of keeping bibliography in Org involve the extra things
you can do with Org headlines compared to BibTeX records:

- You can keep the related notes together with the bibliographic record
  and make use of Org markup, including inline images, inline LaTeX
  formulas, and cross-links to other bibliographic records. An example of
  such record is in the attached screenshot.