The Collection of Computer Science Bibliographies
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Manipulating BibTeX Bibliographies

Each bibliography in this collection has been converted to the BibTeX format in a standardized layout with the aid of bibclean (1.5 MB !) (provided by Nelson Beebe), which can also convert Scribe format to BibTex.
Another BibTeX pretty-printer prettybib is available from the Hypatia Electronic Library.

If you prefer the Refer format you can convert the standardized BibTeX format to Refer with the perl script bibtex2refer.

An BibTeX <=> EndNote <=> BiblioML converting online service is available at University of Arizona.

BibTeX bibliographies can be efficiently searched using biblook/bibindex, a tool provided by Jeff Erickson.

Dana Jacobsen has written a very good Refer/Tib-to-BibTeX converter r2b and maintains a survey of other bibliographic tools also containing a section on BibTeX tools.

The suite of BibTeX tools by Nelson F. Beebe and the material available at the CTAN sites are good starting points when trying to manipulate BibTeX databases.
Noteworthy is BibTool, available on the CTAN sites, which unifies many operations on BibTeX databases into one tool (prettyprinting, field rewriting, sorting, key generation, macro expansion, ...).

The JBibtexManager is a java-based software which offers a convenient GUI interface to BibTeX databases. You can create, edit, sort and search BibTeX files.

If you plan on writing programs that deal with BibTeX data you might want to consider using btOOL: A Programmer's Interface to BibTeX Files by Greg Ward.

For those of you who are running DOS on PCs there is BibDB: free BibTeX database management software provided by Eyal Doron.

Local standard formats

The computer science bibliography collection converts data from the following bibliographic formats to BibTeX:

BibTeX
Refer
tib
Scribe
RFC1357 (superseded by RFC1807, only for technical reports)
RFC1807 (only for technical reports)

Any entries that do not pass the syntax checker are silently omitted during the conversion to BibTeX.

If you are submitting entries in BibTeX format then make sure that all the necessary @String entries are supplied with the actual entries.

Dana Jacobsen has collected more information on the various bibliographic formats and has compiled a survey of bibliographic tools.

Pointers to online publications

If you have online versions of the papers in your bibliography, you should follow the guidelines below:

BibTeX

URLs to the document should be put into the field "url", if you have more than one URL then separate the URLs by whitespace or use several fields of the form "xxx-url" wherexxx is some explanatory string (such as postscript, dvi, ...).
URLs to an abstract should be put into the field "abstract-url".
Similarly, any other URLs should be put into fields ending on "-url" with a self-explanatory prefix.

Never use HTML code in BibTeX references: HTML does not like to mingle with LaTeX.

Refer/Bib/Tib

Put URLs to the document into the "%U" field.

RFC1357

Put URLs to the document into the "RETRIEVAL" field.

RFC1807

Put URLs to the document into the "OTHER-SOURCES" field.

Not all of these fields are official but they are widely used and recognized by my conversion scripts.

Citing other publications in BibTeX bibliographies

If you have a bibliography where publications cite other publications in the same bibliography or if you would like to establish crossreferenes to related publications you can add LaTeX \cite commands in any field in a reference to cite the publications, e.g.:

note = "Bibliography: \cite{Smith1988}, \cite{Anderson1978a}",

note = "For a detailed version also see \cite{Smith1988}. An
       alternative approach is described in \cite{Anderson1978a}",

These citations will be turned into hyperlinks in search results, allowing you to have a look at the cited references. These kind of crossreferences add a lot of value to bibliographies.

Please direct comments regarding the bibliography collection to <liinwwwa@ira.uka.de>.
This page is part of the Computer Science Bibliography Collection.
Copyright © 1994-2004, Alf-Christian Achilles, All Rights Reserved.