Managing Bibliography with Bibshelf

After years of working with a cruddy shellscript, I finally managed to pull it out of my dotfiles and release it as a CLI.

Bibshelf builds upon the basic functionality that I had sketched out in my doi2bib script, but with a few little upgrades.

The basic functionality is the same. Give it a DOI and it will give you the corresponding bibtex entry, But now it can automatically distinguish between a DOI, arXiv ID and an ISBN. The bibtex data is pulled from <doi.org> for papers, and Open Library for books.

$ bs 10.1109/CAIN58948.2023.00034     # doi
$ bs 2211.09545                       # arxiv, new style
$ bs hep-th/9711200                   # arxiv, pre-2007
$ bs 978-0-262-03561-3                # isbn, hyphens optional

Additionally, if you give it a PDF, it will file it automatically within your library: papers go under files/ and books under books. It can also extract the DOI automatically from the pdf using pdftotext under the hood. It will try its best to resolve through user input if multiple DOIs are found in the document.

$ bs --pdf paper.pdf
bs: paper.pdf says 10.1007/s10664-023-10291-1

@article{morovati2023bugs,
  author = {Morovati, Mohammad Mehdi and Nikanjam, Amin and Khomh, Foutse},
  title = {Bugs in Machine Learning-Based Systems: A Faultload Benchmark},
  ...
}

bs: does this match the pdf? [Y/n]:

Files are named using a sane format: [ first author] - [year] - [title]. Several edge cases are handled here. For instance, the entire file name is capped at 255 bytes, colons and double quotes are removed, and accents are folded in the title (Géron becomes Geron) but retrained in the bibtex entry.