bibman

README

bibman

Description

A simple bibliography manager. bibman is a simpler and less feature-rich alternative to applications like papis.

It uses the crossref and datacite apis to search for citations using the DOI.

Features:

• Manually add citations
• Import citations via doi (crossref/datacite api)
• Import citations in bibtex format
• Export bibliography in bibtex format
• TUI to edit the bibliography
• Linking a file to a citation
• Neovim telescope plugin code

Usage

USAGE: bibman [flag] <args>
  For more help visit: https://codeberg.org/KMIJPH/bibman
FLAGS:
  -help	show this message
  -a	<doi> <file> add citation (if no doi specified, add manually)
  -b	prints bibliography in bibtex format to stdout
  -i	imports bibtex from stdin
  -j	prints (simplified) bibliography in json format to stdout
  -t	launch tui

Examples

Adding a citation:

# add manually
EDITOR=nvim bibman -a
# doi
bibman -a "10.1126/science.1155121"
# add a file
bibman -a "10.1126/science.1155121" bonan.pdf

Importing bibtex:

cat test.bib | bibman -i

Exporting to bibtex:

bibman -b > test.bib

Launch the TUI:

EDITOR=nvim bibman -t

Installation

make install

or check out the makefile to do it manually.

Build-time dependencies:

• golang >= 1.18

Runtime dependencies

• none

Further information

Mail

bibman will attempt to look for the MAILADDR environmental variable when querying crossref/datacite, to have some sort of contact information, in case the requests cause trouble (even though the request done by bibman is a rather inexpensive one). Users should follow this "polite" approach, as the data provided by crossref/datacite are free and open.

[...] But this semi-anonymous access is also hard for us to manage. Because the “Public” version of the REST API is free, traffic patterns can vary wildly. Because the service is semi-anonymous it makes it very hard for us to contact people who are causing problems on the system. [...]

For more information, see here.

Bibtex

bibman supports the biblatex specification. It is assumed that biber or any other biblatex compatible bibliography processor is used.

Files

When adding a file to the -a command, bibman copies the file to: $HOME/.local/share/bibliography, which is also bibman's directory for storing its database. On Windows and Mac it will use golang's os.UserCacheDir.

A new filename is given to the file, using author, year and title of the citation. If no file is passed, bibman will link a filename anyway. This makes adding a file after the creation of the citation easier.

Import/Export

When importing bibtex, bibman assumes a reasonably well formatted .bib file. The parsing is not very sophisticated and uses simple regex.
For examples see here.

NOTE: bibman can import .bib files with multiple citations.
NOTE: only the standard set of entry types are supported.
NOTE: only the some of the data fields are supported.

Editing citations

bibman uses the EDITOR environmental variable to edit citations. To change the editor, pass a new EDITOR value (see examples).

Tui

bibman provides a TUI to edit the citation database with VIM-like keybindings. For a list of keybindings and commands type :help in TUI mode.

Neovim plugin

The code for the neovim telescope plugin can be found here. It is the users job to source the file in init.lua.