Managing Scientific Bibliography using Emacs Org-mode

emacs
productivity
Author

Arumoy Shome

Published

November 29, 2023

Abstract
How I organise, search and retrieve my scientific papers using Emacs org-mode.

Front Matter and setup

I store all my bibliographic information in a single bib.org file. I show a hypothetical version of this file below, with two entries. I store each paper, as a level 1 header. I use the bibtex key as the title for the header.

bib.org
#+title: Bibliography
#+tags: test viz data self notebook survey
#+tags: [ test : fair ]

* TODO [#A] amershi2015modeltracker :test:viz:

#+begin_src bibtex
@InProceedings{   amershi2015modeltracker,
  series        = {CHI ’15},
  title         = {ModelTracker: Redesigning Performance Analysis Tools for
                  Machine Learning},
  url           = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2702123.2702509},
  doi           = {10.1145/2702123.2702509},
  booktitle     = {Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human
                  Factors in Computing Systems},
  publisher     = {ACM},
  author        = {Amershi, Saleema and Chickering, Max and Drucker, Steven
                  M. and Lee, Bongshin and Simard, Patrice and Suh, Jina},
  year          = {2015},
  month         = apr,
  collection    = {CHI ’15}
}
#+end_src

* DONE [#A] chen2022fairness       :test:fair:survey:
:LOGBOOK:
- State "DONE"       from "TODO"       [2022-09-19 Mon 14:14]
:END:

Some notes that I may have regarding this paper.

#+begin_src bibtex
@Misc{            chen2023fairness,
  title         = {Fairness Testing: A Comprehensive Survey and Analysis of
                  Trends},
  author        = {Zhenpeng Chen and Jie M. Zhang and Max Hort and Federica
                  Sarro and Mark Harman},
  year          = {2023},
  eprint        = {2207.10223},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  primaryclass  = {cs.SE}
}
#+end_src

Retrieving bibtex information from Crossref

My search for papers always begins on Google Scholar. For papers that I find interesting, I retreive the bibtex information using the doi2bib script. The script accepts the DOI as an argument, and prints the bibtex information obtained from Crossref.

The script also accepts a --preprint flag, in which case, it accepts an Arxiv ID and obtains the bibtex information from Arxiv directly.

Scientific Paper Discovery

You can find more information on how I discovery scientific papers in this blogpost.

doi2bib

You can find more details regarding the doi2bib script in this blogpost.

Capturing bibtex information using org-capture

Emacs org-mode has a nifty capture feature that allows the user to quickly capture information. I have the following capture template to save bibtex information into the bib.org file above.

bib.txt
* %?

#+begin_src bibtex
#+end_src

I have the following org-capture configuration in my init.el file.

init.el
(org-capture-templates
`(("p" "Paper" entry (file aru/org-bib-file)
   "%[~/.emacs.d/org-templates/bib.txt]" :prepend t)))

In Emacs, I hit the keystrokes C-c c followed by the p key to initiate the capture sequence. Org-mode automatically inserts the capture template shown above. It creates a new level 1 header and inserts an empty bibtex source block.

To populate the source block, I hit C-c ' (see org-special-edit for more information on this keybinding). With C-u M-|, I run the doi2bib command along with the DOI to add the output of the command into the source block. C-c ' closes the special edit buffer and returns back to bib.org.

Evil Mode

I now use evil-mode which provides vim keybindings within Emacs. I populate the source block using the :read! command.

Mapping of orgmode features and my usage

In the following table I summarise how I use the built-in orgmode features for organising the bibliographic information.

Feature Purpose
TODO keywords I mark papers that I want to read with the TODO state. Papers that I have already read are marked with the DONE state.
Priority Papers that I find interesting, and cite frequently are marked with the A priority.
Tags I use tags to broadly classify the papers based on topics relevant for my Phd. You can see the tags I use in the example bib.org file provided above.

Searching and Retrieving

I use org-agenda to search and retrieve papers of interest. For instance, I can filter papers that I need to read by asking org-agenda for papers that are marked with the TODO state (see org-todo-list). I can produce a list of all papers that have the testing and data tag (see org-tags-view). More complex search queries can be constructed using the org advanced search commands: for instance, give me all papers on testing that were written by author X in the year of 2001 (see org advanced search syntax).

Back to top