I find formatting is usually a nonissue with BibTeX files as entries tend to already be automatically generated from some authoritative source (e.g., CrossRef).
What I do end up using a lot however is nschloe's betterbib [1].
I'm surprised that no one has mentioned bibtool [1], which is part of a standard TeXLive install. bibtool can also reformat BiBTeX entries and automatically generate keys. I also use it to turn URLs containing DOI to pure DOI using the following rule:
% Turn DOI links into pure DOI.
rename.field { url=doi if url = "10\.[0-9.]+/[-._;()/:a-zA-Z0-9]+" }
rewrite.rule { doi # ".*/\(10\.[0-9.]+\/[-._;()/:a-zA-Z0-9]+\)" # "{\1}" }
My .bib files are a mess. This is partly because I tried to order the file by year then author (manually), which of course resulted in some errors. And also because I write some free text in between entries which talk about the papers and have some keywords that I'm able to search for entries in.
I'd really like some sort of citation manager that uses a .bib file as the data format.
I do basically the same. And I wrote some scripts around to auto-fix certain things.
E.g. I can change the bib entry name, put a comment `% alias: old-name` above it, and my auto-fix script will go through my tex files and update them accordingly. This is helpful when I found out later that I had a duplicate entry, or when I just want to rename the bib entry name.
It is sometimes a bit ambiguous when there is an Arxiv version from a different year than the proceedings publication. In that case, I use the proceedings publication, with a reference to Arxiv as well, and I set the year to the proceedings publication.
I have a consistent format for pure Arxiv publications, using misc, and not article as Google Scholar would output it. If I have this inconsistent anywhere, my script would auto-fix this to make it consistent. Or if some entries are missing, it would automatically complete them.
Does it fix incorrect Unicode chars? I've had a huge problem with that recently when for some reason Kbibtex insisted on converting {\"O} into Ö. I believe Jabref fixed it but I've made very bad experiences with Jabref in the past and would prefer not to use it.
What do you mean?
I tried placing Ö and {\"O} in the author's name of the example and tidied it:
Click Tidy to clean up the entries below
@Book{sweig42,
Author = { Stef{\"O}{n} SwÖig },
title = { The impossible book },
publisher = { Dead Poet Society},
year = 1942,
month = mar
}
This is the output:
Click Tidy to clean up the entries below
@book{sweig42,
title = {The impossible book},
author = {Stef{\"O}{n} SwÖig},
year = 1942,
month = mar,
publisher = {Dead Poet Society}
}
And \"O should be Ö, so I guess I do not really understand what is "incorrect" in your use case.
I know that the Zoteroplugin BetterBibTeX converts Ö to {\"O} when exporting as BibTeX, but keeps it as Ö when exporting as BibLaTeX – maybe Kbibtex has similar options?
edit: It actually "fixes" Ö to {\"O} if you tick "Escape special characters" or supply the command line argument `--escape`, which should be the default according to GitHub.
I meant leaving the Ö as is or even introducing it, which is always wrong with Bibtex. I'm not using Zotero but Jabref also fixes it. There was an Ö in an author name and when I manually changed it to {\"O} Kbibtex reverted it back to an Ö! It's easy to fix by switching to XeTeX but some editorial systems don't use it and will make your manuscript fail.
I was just hoping that the tool fixes this problem, too. Maybe in a future version.
This doesn't answer the question, but I think that if you use XeLaTeX you get Unicode support universally "for free", including in bbl files (generated by bibtex, bibtex8 or biber -- which itself is great, even if it has more of a learning cliff than most!)
There’s also a set of style linting scripts by Matt Might [0] that I’ve found really helpful in my writing. There’s an emacs minor mode built around them too, writegood-mode [1]
You have to watch out about some of these linting tools, though, in case you get slavishly attached to their prescriptions. Some of these tools insist that you can never use passive voice, for instance, and that can lead to some truly barbaric phrasing in some docs I've read where it reads like the writer bent themselves into a pretzel trying to get to the active voice.
In Matt Might's recommended reading section for that tool he points out Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace by Joseph Williams, and reading that book and really learning a lot of things it shows will be much more helpful overall for your writing. Its use of contrasting examples is very effective. For instance, it shows how the passive voice can be a very powerful tool for controlling the flow of topics and ideas and actions in a sentence or paragraph. Through the passive voice you can improve the clarity and coherence of a piece of prose. As Matt Might says, it's about making it a conscious decision rather than to enforce all controlling rules.
This is great! Especially nice to be able to remove entire fields.
Relatedly, here are a couple of tools to ensure that references are complete (e.g. updating arXiv papers to their published versions, mostly for computer science papers):
First I used a VS Code extension for formatting.
After getting into my thesis I switched to Zotero[1] to manage my resources. Its extension BetterBibtex[2] can export into a prettyprinted *.bib which refreshes automatically on change. Works on Zoteros subcollections too.
On a tangential note, this got me really excited that there was a Stefan Sweig book that I hadn't heard of. Alas, it seems as if "the impossible book" is a fiction.
Normally the Bibtex style would automatically do that for you already, and it is configurable. And it would automatically append "et al" then. The templates of many conferences usually do that for you.
What I do end up using a lot however is nschloe's betterbib [1].
[1] https://github.com/nschloe/betterbib