[Tex/LaTex] Merging Bibliographies

bibliographiesbibtex

I have several .bib files, which I'd like to merge together into one. Due to the considerable effort involved in doing it manually I am looking for tool support.

The only tool I found so far is PyBib, which supposedly is capable of merging bib files. However, it appears to be not very polished and breaks easily. After fixing the missing BIBPATH environment variable, it still could not read my bib files properly and complained about syntax errors. In particular, entries that use VARIABLE # { and some text } break the parser.

Are there any other tools available, or which way would you go to merge a bunch of .bib files. I am sure some manual checking is required, but I'd like not to do the whole process by hand.

Best Answer

JabRef may help.

When you try to import a new file to current one, it will examine and label all duplicates automatically. What you need do is just clicking the 'deselect' button.

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[Tex/LaTex] Command-line tools for some bibtex database manipulations

Have a look at biber which in the current 1.5 dev version on SourceForge has a new "tool" mode which allows you to use biber's reencoding and source mapping features independently of biblatex. The source mapping features are what you mainly need from your description and this is all documented in the PDF manual. I can provide specific examples if you have specific questions. biber will do everything you mention above apart from the @string expansion which would be possible to add but as you say, it's fairly idiosyncratic.

Of course, you can do this dynamically with biber too - with the changes being applied as the .bib is read but the .bib is not touched. The new tool mode allows you to write the changed .bib to another file without writing a .bbl.

For example, here is how in tool mode to tackle points 2, 3 5 and 6 in your examples. Point 1 is better handled semantically with biblatex and its max/min names options. Create a biber.conf with:

<config>
  <sourcemap>
    <maps datatype="bibtex" map_overwrite="1">
      <map>
        <map_step map_field_set="issn" map_null="1"/>
      </map>
      <map>
        <per_type>ARTICLE</per_type>
        <map_step map_field_set="title" map_null="1"/>
      </map>
      <map>
        <per_type>ARTICLE</per_type>
        <map_step map_field_source="pages" map_final="1"/>
        <map_step map_field_set="archiveprefix" map_null="1"/>
        <map_step map_field_set="eprint" map_null="1"/>
        <map_step map_field_set="primaryclss" map_null="1"/>
      </map>
    </maps>
    <map>
      <map_step map_field_source="doi" map_match="[\\;]" map_final="1"/>
      <map_step map_field_set="doi" map_null="1"/>
    </map>
  </sourcemap>
</config>

Then run biber with

biber --tool file.bib

Which will look in the default locations for your biber.conf and will output a file called file_bibertool.bib.

This is also all possible, as I said, dynamically using the biber.conf as you process the file normally into a .bbl with biber and also the whole mapping functionality is available in biblatex through macros (see \DeclareSourcemap in the biblatex documentation) if you wanted to do this on a per-document basis dynamically.

[Tex/LaTex] Bibliographies from multiple .bib files

The correct way to load multiple bib files is to use

\bibliography{file1,file2}

Note the lack of space between the comma and the files!

Best Answer

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[Tex/LaTex] Command-line tools for some bibtex database manipulations

[Tex/LaTex] Bibliographies from multiple .bib files

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