biblio

biblio parses and serializes RIS, NBIB (PubMed), EndNote XML, BibTeX, and BibLaTeX through a single unified Record type, so you can read references in one format and write them in another without hand-rolling format-specific logic.

Work in progress. The current Record carries the minimum useful set of fields (title, authors, date, journal, DOI, pages, volume, number, abstract, ISBN/ISSN). Additional fields – keywords, URLs, publication type, language, funding, affiliations, and more – will be added in upcoming releases.

Quick start

Add biblio to your project (requires Rust 1.85.0 or newer):

cargo add biblio

Parse a BibTeX file and re-export as RIS:

use biblio::{bibtex, ris};

let bibtex_input = r#"
@article{doe2024,
  title  = {An interesting finding},
  author = {Doe, Jane and Smith, John},
  year   = {2024},
  journal = {Nature},
  doi    = {10.1038/s41586-024-07386-0},
}
"#;

let records = bibtex::parse(bibtex_input).unwrap();
let ris_output = ris::serialize(&records);
println!("{ris_output}");

Every format module exposes the same two-function interface:

fn parse(input: &str) -> Result<Vec<Record>, Error>;
fn serialize(records: &[Record]) -> String;

The Record type

Record is a plain struct with public fields – no builder, no hidden state:

use biblio::{Record, PublicationDate};

let rec = Record {
    title: "My paper".into(),
    authors: vec!["Doe, Jane".into()],
    date: Some(PublicationDate { year: 2024, month: None, day: None }),
    ..Default::default()
};

Fields that don't map neatly to the common schema (PMID, PMCID, citation key, etc.) land in extras: HashMap<String, String> so nothing is silently dropped.

Error handling

All parsers return Result<Vec<Record>, biblio::Error>. The error type distinguishes empty input, missing required fields (with the offending tag name and line number), malformed syntax, and internal errors.

License

Licensed under either of Apache-2.0 or MIT at your option.