[Tex/LaTex] Ways to check the differences between references in two bib files

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I am wondering if there is any existing ways to check if the same references in two different bib files has different years?
For example, if in one file, the reference is in press, and then in the other it is 2017, and there should be a warning saying that the year is different?

Thanks in advance

Best Answer

JabRef has a 'detect duplicate' feature: http://help.jabref.org/en/FindDuplicates

The results vary. It detects the duplicate fine for the following two entries

@Article{Sigfridsson1998,
  author  = {Emma Sigfridsson and Ulf Ryde},
  title   = {Comparison of methods for deriving atomic charges from the electrostatic potential and moments},
  journal = {Journal of Computational Chemistry},
  year    = {1998},
  volume  = {19},
  number  = {4},
  pages   = {377--395},
}

@Article{SigfridssonRyde,
  author  = {Emma Sigfridsson and Ulf Ryde},
  title   = {Comparison of Methods for Deriving Atomic Charges from the Electrostatic Potential and Moments},
  journal = {J. Comput. Chem.},
  year    = {1998},
  volume  = {19},
  number  = {4},
  pages   = {377--395},
  doi     = {10.1002/(sici)1096-987x(199803)19:4<377::aid-jcc1>3.0.co;2-p},
}

But if there are more differences between the entries (remove number in of the two for example) it will not realise the two are duplicates any more.

Duplicate detection is quite a hard task: Obviously you don't want to create too many false positives, while at the same time you want to find less obvious duplication such as typos, abbreviations, ... If you have a more robust idea how this should work I'm sure the JabRef developers would not mind a feature request (or even better a pull request): https://github.com/JabRef/jabref/issues/

Other tools are mentioned in Cleaning up a .bib file, Find Duplicated article titles in my .bib file and Find and match corresponding arXiv preprints and journal articles. Some of these try to retrieve information for an entry from an external source to detect duplicates. Other just rely on duplication of field contents or title comparison.

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