bibtex-tidy is a utility for cleaning and formatting BibTeX bibliography files. It brings inconsistently formatted references into a standardised layout, making bibliographies easier to read, maintain and share.
BibTeX files obtained from publishers, academic databases and reference managers often differ in their field ordering, capitalisation and spacing. bibtex-tidy addresses these inconsistencies without requiring references to be edited individually.
The program can be run from the command line or integrated into automated workflows. A browser-based interface is also available. Its focus is on cleaning existing bibliography data rather than collecting research papers or managing a reference library.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Configurable indentation, field alignment, blank lines and value wrapping.
- Sort bibliography entries by citation key, author, year or other fields, with ascending and descending ordering.
- Reorder fields within entries using a predefined order or custom field list.
- Detect duplicate references using citation keys, DOIs, abstracts or similarities between authors and titles.
- Merge duplicate entries, with options to retain, combine or overwrite field values.
- Remove empty or duplicate fields, omit specified fields and strip comments.
- Generate citation keys from author names, publication years and titles, with support for configurable patterns.
- Normalise month values, convert numeric fields and adjust capitalisation.
- Convert between LaTeX character escapes and Unicode, and percent-encode invalid URL characters.
- Control brace handling, including preserving capitalisation in selected fields.
- Write formatted output to another file or standard output. The command-line tool overwrites input files by default unless instructed otherwise.
- Integrate with Git pre-commit hooks to format bibliography files automatically.
- JavaScript and TypeScript API for integration into other applications.
Website: github.com/FlamingTempura/bibtex-tidy
Support:
Developer: FlamingTempura
License: MIT License
Related Software
| Terminal-Based Bibliography Tools | |
|---|---|
| coBib | Simple, console-based bibliography management tool |
| papis | Extensible command-line based document and bibliography manager |
| bibiman | TUI for fast and simple interaction with a BibLaTeX database |
| Hayagriva | Rusty bibliography management |
| bibman (Haskell) | CLI/TUI bibliography manager |
| pubs | Bibliography on the command line |
| BibMan (Python) | TUI bibliography manager |
| Xapers | Personal journal article management system |
| Bibman (Perl) | Small console tool for managing BibTeX files |
| papers | Command-line tool to manage bibliography |
| CiteBib | Generate a Bibtex or LaTeX bibliography |
| bibclean | BiBTeX and Scribe bibliography prettyprinter and syntax checker |
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