Description

Read and write 'BibTeX' files. Convert between bibliography formats, including 'BibTeX', 'BibLaTeX', EndNote, and 'Bibentry'. Includes a port of the 'bibutils' utilities by Chris Putnam <https://sourceforge.net/projects/bibutils/>. Supports all bibliography formats and character encodings implemented in 'bibutils'.

Details

Package rbibutils provides an R port of the bibutils programs plus additional facilities. The main function, bibConvert, offers all conversions between bibliography formats supported by library bibutils. In addition, package rbibutils converts to and from R's bibentry Bibtex-based bibliography format.

The core functionality is provided by the bibutils programs which convert between various bibliography formats using a common MODS XML intermediate format, see the source cited below.

Currently we provide the function bibConvert for conversion between supported bibliography formats. For complete list of formats supported by the package, see the documentation of the original bibutils library.

readBib and writeBib import/export BiBTeX files. readBibentry and writeBibentry import/export R source files in which the references are represented by bibentry() calls. These functions were originally just wrappers around bibConvert. readBib has acquired additional features, including a direct import (without going through bibConvert) from BiBTeX files.

All encodings supported by the bibutils library are available for bibConvert.

Further functionality may be provided in future releases, in particular, the underlying C functions could be exposed to package authors. Further R wrappers may be added, as well. However, the scope of the package will remain conversion between formats based on bibutils and manipulation of the MODS XML intermediate format. rbibutils can be used also as an alternative to package bibtex (Francois 2020). For bibliography management see package RefManager (McLean 2017). For citations in R documentation (Rd or roxygen2) see package Rdpack (Boshnakov 2020).

Supported input and output formats

Most formats are supported for both input and output, see the listings below. A format supported for input can be converted to any of the output formats.

The input is first converted to MODS XML intermediate, the latter is then converted to the requested output format. Currently the only exception to this is the conversion from bibentry to BibTeX, for which R provides a print method.

Input formats

bibentry

bibentry is the native R variant of BibTeX. It can be input from an R source file or from a binary rds file. The "rds" format is a compressed binary format. The rds file should contain a bibentry R object, saved from R with saveRDS. An R source file should contain one or more bibentry instructions, see readBibentry for details of the contents.

BibTeX

BibLaTeX

COPAC format references

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copac

EndNote (Refer format)

EndNote XML

ISI web of science

Pubmed XML references

Pubmed/National Library of Medicine nbib format

RIS format

MODS XML intermediate

Output formats

ADS

Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Astrophyics Data System, or ADS reference format.

bibentry

A bibentry object. Can be written to a file as a binary ("rds") object or as R source file, see bibConvert and writeBib for details.

BibTeX

BibLaTeX

EndNote (Refer format)

ISI web of science

MODS XML intermediate

Pubmed/National Library of Medicine nbib format

RIS format

Word 2007 bibliography format

Note

The bibutils library is included in a number of software packages. These include include pandoc and a library for Haskell. Executable programs for conversion are available for Linux distributions but seem not easily available for Windows. Executable and libraries can also be generated out-of-the-box from the bibutils disribution (on Windows under MSYS).

Author(s)

Georgi N. Boshnakov (R code and R port of bibutils), Chris Putnam (author of bibutils library)

References

Boshnakov GN (2020). “Rdpack: Update and Manipulate Rd Documentation Objects.” doi: 10.5281/zenodo.3925612, R package version 1.0.0.

Francois R. (2020). bibtex: Bibtex Parser. R package version 0.4.2.2. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=bibtex.

McLean MW (2017). “RefManageR: Import and Manage BibTeX and BibLaTeX References in R.” _The Journal of Open Source Software_. doi: 10.21105/joss.00338.

Putnam C. (2003–2020), Library bibutils, https://sourceforge.net/projects/bibutils/.

See Also

bibConvert for further details and examples