knitr: write_bib – R documentation

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write_bib

Generate BibTeX bibliography databases for R packages

Description

This function uses utils::citation() and utils::toBibtex() to create bib entries for R packages and write them in a file. It can facilitate the auto-generation of bibliography databases for R packages, and it is easy to regenerate all the citations after updating R packages.

Usage

write_bib(
  x = .packages(),
  file = "",
  tweak = TRUE,
  width = NULL,
  prefix = getOption("knitr.bib.prefix", "R-"),
  lib.loc = NULL
)

Arguments

`x`	Package names. Packages which are not installed are ignored.
`file`	The (‘.bib’) file to write. By default, or if `NULL`, output is written to the R console.
`tweak`	Whether to fix some known problems in the citations, especially non-standard format of author names.
`width`	Width of lines in bibliography entries. If `NULL`, lines will not be wrapped.
`prefix`	Prefix string for keys in BibTeX entries; by default, it is R- unless `option('knitr.bib.prefix')` has been set to another string.
`lib.loc`	A vector of path names of R libraries.

Details

For a package, the keyword R-pkgname is used for its bib item, where pkgname is the name of the package. Citation entries specified in the ‘CITATION’ file of the package are also included. The main purpose of this function is to automate the generation of the package citation information because it often changes (e.g. author, year, package version, ...).

Value

A list containing the citations. Citations are also written to the file as a side effect.

Note

Some packages on CRAN do not have standard bib entries, which was once reported by Michael Friendly at https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2010-November/058977.html. I find this a real pain, and there are no easy solutions except contacting package authors to modify their DESCRIPTION files. Anyway, the argument tweak has provided ugly hacks to deal with packages which are known to be non-standard in terms of the format of citations; tweak = TRUE is by no means intended to hide or modify the original citation information. It is just due to the loose requirements on package authors for the DESCRIPTION file. On one hand, I apologize if it really mangles the information about certain packages; on the other, I strongly recommend package authors to consider the Authors@R field (see the manual Writing R Extensions) to make it easier for other people to cite R packages. See knitr:::.tweak.bib for details of tweaks. Also note this is subject to future changes since R packages are being updated. If you want to contribute more tweaks, please edit the file ‘inst/misc/tweak_bib.csv’ in the source package.

Author(s)

Yihui Xie and Michael Friendly

Examples

write_bib(c("RGtk2", "gWidgets"), file = "R-GUI-pkgs.bib")
unlink("R-GUI-pkgs.bib")

write_bib(c("animation", "rgl", "knitr", "ggplot2"))
write_bib(c("base", "parallel", "MASS"))  # base and parallel are identical
write_bib("cluster", prefix = "")  # a empty prefix
write_bib("digest", prefix = "R-pkg-")  # a new prefix
write_bib("digest", tweak = FALSE)  # original version

# what tweak=TRUE does
str(knitr:::.tweak.bib)

knitr

A General-Purpose Package for Dynamic Report Generation in R

v1.33

GPL

Authors

Yihui Xie [aut, cre] (<https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0645-5666>), Abhraneel Sarma [ctb], Adam Vogt [ctb], Alastair Andrew [ctb], Alex Zvoleff [ctb], Andre Simon [ctb] (the CSS files under inst/themes/ were derived from the Highlight package http://www.andre-simon.de), Aron Atkins [ctb], Aaron Wolen [ctb], Ashley Manton [ctb], Atsushi Yasumoto [ctb] (<https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8335-495X>), Ben Baumer [ctb], Brian Diggs [ctb], Brian Zhang [ctb], Bulat Yapparov [ctb], Cassio Pereira [ctb], Christophe Dervieux [ctb], David Hall [ctb], David Hugh-Jones [ctb], David Robinson [ctb], Doug Hemken [ctb], Duncan Murdoch [ctb], Elio Campitelli [ctb], Ellis Hughes [ctb], Emily Riederer [ctb], Fabian Hirschmann [ctb], Fitch Simeon [ctb], Forest Fang [ctb], Frank E Harrell Jr [ctb] (the Sweavel package at inst/misc/Sweavel.sty), Garrick Aden-Buie [ctb], Gregoire Detrez [ctb], Hadley Wickham [ctb], Hao Zhu [ctb], Heewon Jeon [ctb], Henrik Bengtsson [ctb], Hiroaki Yutani [ctb], Ian Lyttle [ctb], Hodges Daniel [ctb], Jake Burkhead [ctb], James Manton [ctb], Jared Lander [ctb], Jason Punyon [ctb], Javier Luraschi [ctb], Jeff Arnold [ctb], Jenny Bryan [ctb], Jeremy Ashkenas [ctb, cph] (the CSS file at inst/misc/docco-classic.css), Jeremy Stephens [ctb], Jim Hester [ctb], Joe Cheng [ctb], Johannes Ranke [ctb], John Honaker [ctb], John Muschelli [ctb], Jonathan Keane [ctb], JJ Allaire [ctb], Johan Toloe [ctb], Jonathan Sidi [ctb], Joseph Larmarange [ctb], Julien Barnier [ctb], Kaiyin Zhong [ctb], Kamil Slowikowski [ctb], Karl Forner [ctb], Kevin K. Smith [ctb], Kirill Mueller [ctb], Kohske Takahashi [ctb], Lorenz Walthert [ctb], Lucas Gallindo [ctb], Marius Hofert [ctb], Martin Modrák [ctb], Michael Chirico [ctb], Michael Friendly [ctb], Michal Bojanowski [ctb], Michel Kuhlmann [ctb], Miller Patrick [ctb], Nacho Caballero [ctb], Nick Salkowski [ctb], Niels Richard Hansen [ctb], Noam Ross [ctb], Obada Mahdi [ctb], Pavel N. Krivitsky [ctb] (<https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9101-3362>), Qiang Li [ctb], Ramnath Vaidyanathan [ctb], Richard Cotton [ctb], Robert Krzyzanowski [ctb], Romain Francois [ctb], Ruaridh Williamson [ctb], Scott Kostyshak [ctb], Sebastian Meyer [ctb], Sietse Brouwer [ctb], Simon de Bernard [ctb], Sylvain Rousseau [ctb], Taiyun Wei [ctb], Thibaut Assus [ctb], Thibaut Lamadon [ctb], Thomas Leeper [ctb], Tim Mastny [ctb], Tom Torsney-Weir [ctb], Trevor Davis [ctb], Viktoras Veitas [ctb], Weicheng Zhu [ctb], Wush Wu [ctb], Zachary Foster [ctb]

Initial release