I'm writing a paper and most my citation are from arxiv. Those papers have many useful citations I want to re-cite. However to do that I have to extract many citations from pdf, find their canonical name and .bib entry, and finally, cite them.
What I want to achieve is take pdf (mostly from arxiv), and automatically generate .bib file with all cited papers inside.
Any tools or help is appreciated.
Best Answer
You can use the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abstract_service.html. It indexes several scientific journals, mostly in the fields of astronomy/astrophysics, including all e-prints on arXiv.
For example, go to the page of this e-print: https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.00684, click on the "NASA ADS" button in the box on the right and you'll be directed to http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/bib_query?arXiv:1704.00684. In this page, click on the "References in the Article" button and you'll get the list of all references cited in the paper. Click on the bibcode of one of them and in the abstract page you can click on the "Bibtex entry for this abstract" to automatically obtain the BibTeX entry for it.
At https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/ there is a fancier version of SAO/NASA ADS, with a more modern user interface.