The process of searching for BibTeX entries is cumbersome and annoying. Authors are inconsistent in providing them, and they are optional on the arXiv. Google Scholar is useful, but yielding BibTeX entries requires drilling down into entries. What's worse, for some research fields (such as citations from the ACL Anthology), the correct citations are not the first search result. And anyway, why should you have to open a web browser to do something that is inherently text-based? Ideally one should have to do these tasks only once per paper, but the reality is that management of a database introduces another set of problems.
If this problem statement strikes a chord, bibsearch
is the tool for you.
It provides the following services:
- Keyword-based search against a private collection of entries (
bibsearch search
) - Automatic downloading of citations from predefined collections (
bibsearch add bib://
) or arbitrary URI's (bibsearch add
) - Searching and downloading from the arXiv (
bibsearch arxiv
) - Automatic generation of a project BibTeX file from LaTeX source (
bibsearch tex
) - Keyword-based downloading and opening of PDF files (
bibsearch open
)
Stick to the command line where life is best!
Install bibsearch with
pip3 install bibsearch
bibsearch
requires SQLite with full-text search support.
This causes no performance degradation to SQLite, but is unfortunately not part of the default installation.
If you are on a Mac and have brew installed, you can get this with
brew reinstall sqlite3 --with-fts5
Create your database by importing BibTeX files. There are lots of shortcuts defined in the form of collections. For example, there is a collection for the entire ACL Anthology. To add papers from NAACL 2017, you can type:
bibsearch add bib://acl/naacl/2017
or to add all of NAACL:
bibsearch add bib://acl/naacl
Or even the entire anthology:
bibsearch add bib://acl
Other collections available include ICML and NIPS.
You can also add your own files, either locally or via URL.
# Import from a URL
bibsearch add http://aclweb.org/anthology/P/P17/P17-2.bib
# Add a bibtex file from a local database
bibsearch add main.bib
Multiple arguments are permitted at once. Duplicate keys are successfully ignored.
Now, search across all fields to find your entries:
bibsearch search brown 1993 statistical
(find
also works)
Get the outputs in BibTeX format:
bibsearch search brown 1993 statistical
If there is only one match, you can also open the corresponding PDF:
bibsearch open brown 1993 statistical
open
will work implicitly on the results of the last search, so you could also have typed:
bibsearch open
Generate the BibTeX file based on citations found in a LaTeX source (requires that LATEX_FILE.aux
exists):
bibsearch tex LATEX_FILE
and write it to the bibliography file specified in the LaTeX:
bibsearch tex LATEX_FILE -B
Print a summary of your database:
bibsearch print --summary
Search the arXiv:
bibsearch arxiv vaswani attention is all you need
Add the results to your database:
bibsearch arxiv vaswani attention is all you need -a
Open the PDF:
bibsearch open
Get the key to use with \cite
:
$ bibsearch search vaswani attention
[vaswani:2017:attention] Vaswani, Ashish and Shazeer, Noam and Parmar,
Niki and Uszkoreit, Jakob and Jones, Llion and Gomez, Aidan N. and
Kaiser, Lukasz and Polosukhin, Illia "Attention Is All You Need",
ARXIV 2017
If you use the following in a Makefile, you can use bibsearch to find paper keys, and avoid creating the bibliography file entirely.
bibsearch
will generate it for you!
pdflatex PAPER
bibsearch tex PAPER -B
bibtex PAPER
pdflatex PAPER
pdflatex PAPER
This generates whatever bib file is referenced in PAPER.tex.