I have a BibTeX file containing many references, where the journal titles are (for the most part) written out in full. I would like to replace these in my reference list with the standard abbreviated titles.
Searching the web I can find many suggested solutions to this problem. These all seem to involve maintaining either maintaining your own database of search-and-replace strings, using a GUI reference manager (Jabref), or editing the whole .bib
file so that every journal name is a macro call.
My .bib
file has 171 entries (it was originally the references for my thesis and I've kept adding to it since then, using the same file for every paper), so creating and maintaining my own database of journal abbreviations would be a huge undertaking. While I will just start using Jabref if I have to, it doesn't seem right that I should have to use a GUI package to solve such an inherently text-based problem.
What I really want is a script (or even better, a LaTeX package) that will just go through my .bib
file and replace every full journal name with an abbreviation looked up in one of the many standard databases that exist for this purpose. (Of course there will probably be some that get missed, but I don't mind fixing one or two by hand.)
I'm guessing that such a painless, transparent solution doesn't exist, but it can't hurt to ask here. It seems to me that this must be a very common thing to want to do, and I'm kind of surprised that the functionality isn't just built into BibTeX in the first place.