LinkedBibTex

A solution to make your BibTex files automatically

This repository provides a simple solution to automatically create and manage your bibliography file in BibTex using DBLP. It saves time of modifying your .bib file back and forth. Here it is how it works:

Each entry on DBLP has a unique identifier called dblp key which is provided down below the export button of each article (see this article, for example). When citing a reference, the author cites using dblp key as in \cite{dblp key} without importing the bibliographic entry in the .bibtex file. This solution creates the .bib file automatically for you when compiling the .tex file and the author would not need to import bibliographic data manually any more.

Requirements

• Python
• DBLP's API
• bibtex-dblp

How to use this?

Nothing is going to change with the way you prepare your document in Tex or the way you cite your references. However, there is one additional step that should be taken into account when compiling your files.

Normally, compiling a Tex file with bibliography looks like the following in the command-line:

pdflatex -> bibtex -> pdflatex -> pdflatex

To create the file of references automatically, the following command is to be added:

makebib -> pdflatex -> bibtex -> pdflatex -> pdflatex

Here is an example where we want to compile the following document (which is called article.tex):

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
	This is an example to cite a few papers such as
	\cite{journals/algorithms/Lucena-SanchezS21} and
	\cite{journals/sqj/GiraldoCEP21,conf/eacl/SinghVGS21}.

\bibliographystyle{unsrt}
\bibliography{references}
\end{document}

Now, compiling of your file would look like this:

python makebib.py article.tex
pdflatex article.tex
bibtex article
pdflatex article.tex
pdflatex article.tex

What's next?

I believe that this project is yet to become truly functional. Here are a few ideas:

• Creating a centralized bibliographic database to facilitate data retrieval, particularly via an API or SPARQL endpoint. Unfortunately, Google Scholar as one of the major bibliographic databases does not seem to provide such required functionalities for more inter-operable services. Although DBLP does an amazing job with its API, it does not include material from other fields but Computer Science.
• Support from other cloud-based LaTeX editors such as Overleaf. Many users may not even be able to install Python on their computer.
• I tried to find a way to use the current solution as a package in Tex to be imported directly with the .tex file. I couldn't find an appropriate solution (tried PythonTeX, too). If you have any idea, let me know 🙂