Import and Manage BibTeX and BibLaTeX references with RefManageR

RefManageR provides tools for importing and working with bibliographic references. It greatly enhances the bibentry class by providing a class BibEntry which stores BibTeX and BibLaTeX references, supports UTF-8 encoding, and can be easily searched by any field, by date ranges, and by various formats for name lists (author by last names, translator by full names, etc.). Entries can be updated, combined, sorted, printed in a number of styles, and exported. BibTeX and BibLaTeX .bib files can be read into R and converted to BibEntry objects. Interfaces to NCBI's Entrez, CrossRef, and Zotero are provided for importing references and references can be created from locally stored PDFs using Poppler. Includes functions for citing and generating a bibliography with hyperlinks for documents prepared with RMarkdown or RHTML.

Details

Importing and Creating References

BibEntry objects can be created directly using the BibEntry function. .bib files can be read into R using the ReadBib function. Tools are provided for importing references from Crossref, Zotero, Google Scholar, and PDFs and looking up PubMed ID's and DOIs. See ReadPDFs, ReadZotero, ReadCrossRef, ReadGS, ReadPubMed, GetPubMedByID, GetPubMedRelated.

Manipulating BibEntry objects

BibEntry objects may be searched and indexed by field values, name lists, keys, dates, date ranges, etc. See [.BibEntry, [<-.BibEntry, [[.BibEntry, $.BibEntry.

Printing and Exporting Bibliographies

The print.BibEntry function can print in a number of formats (e.g. text, html) and most of the base bibliography styles available with BibLaTeX (e.g. alphabetic, numeric, authortitle, and authoryear). toBibtex.BibEntry will convert a BibEntry object to a character vector containing lines of a BibTeX file, converting fields, entry types and expanding crossreferences as needed to coerce BibLaTeX entries to BibTeX. toBiblatex converts the BibEntry object to a character vector containing lines of the corresponding BibLaTeX file. The results can be written to a file using WriteBib.

Citations can be generated in a number of styles using one of the available functions for citations. A list of references can be printed based on the works the user has cited thus far in their document. See Cite. The citations and bibliography can be printed including hyperlinks using either the R Markdown or R HTML formats.

Additional features

All sorting methods for bibliographies available in the BibLaTeX LaTeX package have been implemented see sort.BibEntry and the references.

Using open.BibEntry electronic copies of references can be opened in a PDF viewer or web browser.

The convenience function BibOptions is provided for setting defaults for commonly used functions such as print.BibEntry, [.BibEntry, and Cite. Its interface is similar to options.

References

McLean, M. W. (2014). Straightforward Bibliography Management in R Using the RefManageR Package. arXiv: 1403.2036 [cs.DL]. Submitted.

Kime, P., M. Wemheuer, and P. Lehman (2022). The biblatex Package. http://mirrors.ibiblio.org/CTAN/macros/latex/contrib/biblatex/doc/biblatex.pdf.

Hornik, K., D. Murdoch, and A. Zeileis (2012). Who Did What? The Roles of R Package Authors and How to Refer to Them. The R Journal 4, 1. https://journal.r-project.org/archive/2012-1/RJournal_2012-1_Hornik~et~al.pdf

Patashnik, O (1988). Bibtexing. https://tug.org/texmf-docs/bibtex/btxdoc.pdf.

Author

McLean, M. W. mathew.w.mclean@gmail.com