[OS X TeX] Accessing certain fields in a BibTeX-entry directly "in place"

[Daniel Käsmayr]

Dear Folks,

I am not sure if what I am trying to accomplish is even possibly as I  
really haven’t digested all there is to TeX (yet ;)).

Is there some way to get the contents of a Bibtex field with some  
sort of command? Like "get the field $comment from citation labelXYZ  
and print it here."

The background for this is: I am writing my thesis in chemistry and  
would like to have some sort of index of my chemical compounds which  
all have a short name, a long name, my internal name (i.e. label),  
have characteristics such as molecular weights, have associated  
sections in the text where they are mentioned - etc; and I would love  
to have a list of all these compounds in my appendix - including  
graphics etc.

I was thinking along the lines of creating a custom bibtex file for  
this and then working my way up from it. But still - I would need  
those "database" like features... is bibtex designed for this at all?

Am I making sense? Has anyone heard of such a thing being done in  
LaTeX before?

thx,

Daniel------------------------- Info --------------------------
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