Scientific journals and conferences usually favor
LaTeX for paper submission, while geeky conferences and publishers prefer
DocBook. Having used both (for instance, this
Perl for the hurried (in Spanish) was written in DocBook, while I use LaTeX for all papers.
Bibliography handling is quite easy in LaTeX, and rendering tools are part of the distro. The main problem I find with DocBook is that there's a wide array of rendering tools, to the point that the result in different platforms can vary wildly in quality; in fact, the DocBook spec only includes rendering hints. Its main advantage, on the other hand, is the semantic markup, which, to a point, is also possible in LaTeX, but not as completely as in DocBook.
In any case, if I had to write a new paper, I'd use LaTeX; if I had to write a new tutorial, I'd go for DocBook.
