BibTeX files are typically manually maintained and thus often contain inconsistencies, mistakes, or are missing information. betterbib helps maintaining your BibTeX files by comparing them with online sources and correcting whatever entries are found faulty.

Simply run

betterbib in.bib out.bib

to improve your BibTeX file with default settings. For example, the input BibTeX

@article {krylov,
  author = {Liesen and Gaul and Nabben},
  title = {Framework Deflation Krylov Augmented}
}

is converted to

@article{krylov,
 author = {Gaul, André and Gutknecht, Martin H. and Liesen, Jörg and Nabben, Reinhard},
 title = {A Framework for Deflated and Augmented {Krylov} Subspace Methods},
 doi = {10.1137/110820713},
 number = {2},
 pages = {495-518},
 source = {Crossref},
 url = {https://doi.org/10.1137/110820713},
 volume = {34},
 journal = {SIAM J. Matrix Anal. & Appl.},
 publisher = {Society for Industrial & Applied Mathematics (SIAM)},
 issn = {0895-4798, 1095-7162},
 year = {2013},
 month = jan,
}

All of the following tools can read from standard input and write to standard output, so you can concatenate them to get exactly what you want. For example, the above betterbib command is short for

betterbib-sync in.bib | betterbib-journal-abbrev | betterbib-format -b - out.bib

betterbib fetches data from

• Crossref (default) or
• DBLP (--source dblp).

All betterbib-sync command-line options are explained in betterbib-sync -h.

The tool

betterbib-format in.bib out.bib

allows you to apply consistent formatting to you BibTeX file. See -h/--help for options.

The tool

betterbib-journal-abbrev in.bib out.bib

allows you to apply consistent abbreviation of journal names. See -h/--help for options.

In BibTeX titles, some words need to be protected by curly brackets such that they are capitalized correctly, e.g., {Einstein}. betterbib automatically recognizes some of them (if they are in the default dictionary, like Einstein), but you might want to add some. To this end, create the config file

~/.config/betterbib/config.ini

and fill it with, e.g.,

[DICTIONARY]
add=Arnoldi,
    Bernstein,
    Boolean,
    Chebyshev,
    Hermitian

remove=hermitian,
   boolean

betterbib is available from the Python Package Index, so simply do

pip install -U betterbib

to install or upgrade. Use sudo -H to install as root or the --user option of pip to install in $HOME.

To run the betterbib unit tests, check out this repository and type

pytest

To create a new release

1. bump the __version__ number,

2. publish to PyPi and tag on GitHub:

   $ make publish
   

betterbib is published under the MIT license.