Trying to revive an old thread... I have just recently decided to finally start using BibTeX. Everything is pretty straightforward, except the placement of the database. I want the bib files to be in one location which hopefully gets backed up, e.g. a Dropbox folder. So I created ~/Dropbox/.texmf and edited 05TeXMF.cnf to have the definition:

TEXMFHOME = $HOME/Dropbox/.texmf
I even "sudo texhash" -ed and "sudo mktexlsr" -ed although not everyone seemed to agree that it was necessary, but BibTeX still cannot find the database unless I give a full pathname in the .tex file. What am I missing?

Thanks in advance!