How do you manage bibtex?

Question

Hi all, I have been in academia for some time and I find citing tedious. Latex and bibtex are great, but the bibtex files for papers on the web are often incomplete or change over time (e.g., a paper first in Arxiv is published in a conference). Is there anything that I can use to pull the official reference from somewhere? If not, why isn't there a centralized place for bibtex? So far I have been using Mendeley and fixing references by hand. It seems that referencing in latex is stuck in the past for something that should be relatively simple to fix (ie., have a repository with bibtex and people submit pull requests with changes). Having a DOI helps, but it does not guarantee that the bibtex is correct either. Thanks!

privong · Accepted Answer

I've had similar struggles in the past. My solution at the time was a bib file quasi-managed by hand using JabRef. I would also periodically do some automatic updating using a script I wrote[0]. The script uses the NASA Astrophysics Data System to look for updates to papers (they cross-match arXiv preprints with the eventual publications) and updates the bibtex accordingly. It mostly worked, but there were some bugs (the last 10% takes 90% of the time).
I've since resorted to more hand-checking of references when I'm publishing a paper. Rreference management is tedious, but I've found that it is overall is a minor fraction of the time spent working on a paper. So it doesn't seem worth spending too much effort automating.
[0] https://github.com/privong/PaperTools/blob/main/bib_update.p...

jchiyah · Answer

I see, thanks for the answers! I am surprised there isn't some sort of community database for bibtex files (similar to MusicBrainz Picard) where everyone contributes and keeps updating them over time. Even bibtex from author's websites differ from conference bibtex in format and/or missing fields.

jjgreen · Answer

I have a set of hand-curated bib files for the papers of interest in my field, version controlled and using a consistent key scheme. Then for a particular paper, use bibtool to extract a subset from those.