Citation Manager

Tools and guidance for managing BibTeX citations in research projects.

When to Use

•Converting DOIs to BibTeX entries
•Building a references.bib file from scratch
•Validating existing citations
•Deduplicating citation files
•Standardizing citation formats

Tools

DOI to BibTeX

Convert a DOI to a properly formatted BibTeX entry:

bash

python .claude/skills/citation-manager/scripts/doi_to_bibtex.py "10.1234/example.doi"

Batch conversion from file:

bash

python .claude/skills/citation-manager/scripts/doi_to_bibtex.py --file dois.txt --output references.bib

Validate Citations

Check a .bib file for common issues:

bash

python .claude/skills/citation-manager/scripts/validate_citations.py references.bib

Checks for:

•Missing required fields
•Invalid DOIs
•Duplicate entries
•Inconsistent formatting

BibTeX Entry Types

Conference Paper (@inproceedings)

bibtex

@inproceedings{author2024keyword,
  title     = {Full Paper Title Here},
  author    = {Last, First and Last2, First2 and Last3, First3},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Conference Name},
  year      = {2024},
  pages     = {1--10},
  doi       = {10.1234/example},
}

Required: title, author, booktitle, year Optional: pages, doi, url, volume

Journal Article (@article)

bibtex

@article{author2024keyword,
  title   = {Full Article Title Here},
  author  = {Last, First and Last2, First2},
  journal = {Journal Name},
  year    = {2024},
  volume  = {42},
  number  = {3},
  pages   = {100--115},
  doi     = {10.1234/example},
}

Required: title, author, journal, year Optional: volume, number, pages, doi

arXiv Preprint (@misc)

bibtex

@misc{author2024keyword,
  title         = {Full Paper Title Here},
  author        = {Last, First and Last2, First2},
  year          = {2024},
  eprint        = {2401.12345},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  primaryclass  = {cs.CL},
}

Required: title, author, year, eprint Optional: archiveprefix, primaryclass

Book (@book)

bibtex

@book{author2024keyword,
  title     = {Book Title},
  author    = {Last, First},
  publisher = {Publisher Name},
  year      = {2024},
  address   = {City},
}

Required: title, author/editor, publisher, year Optional: address, edition, volume

Citation Key Conventions

Format: authorYEARkeyword

Examples:

•vaswani2017attention - Vaswani et al., 2017, "Attention Is All You Need"
•brown2020language - Brown et al., 2020, GPT-3 paper
•devlin2019bert - Devlin et al., 2019, BERT paper

Rules:

•Lowercase first author's last name
•Four-digit year
•Meaningful keyword from title (lowercase)
•No spaces, hyphens, or special characters

Common Venue Abbreviations

Conferences

Full Name	Abbreviation
Neural Information Processing Systems	NeurIPS
International Conference on Machine Learning	ICML
International Conference on Learning Representations	ICLR
Association for Computational Linguistics	ACL
Empirical Methods in NLP	EMNLP
North American Chapter of ACL	NAACL
Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition	CVPR
AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence	AAAI

Journals

Full Name	Abbreviation
Journal of Machine Learning Research	JMLR
Transactions on Machine Learning Research	TMLR
Artificial Intelligence	AI
Machine Learning	ML

Workflow

Building references.bib

•Collect DOIs: As you read papers, collect DOIs
•Convert: Use doi_to_bibtex.py to convert
•Validate: Run validate_citations.py to check
•Organize: Sort alphabetically by key
•Integrate: Add to paper/references.bib

Citing in LaTeX

latex

% Parenthetical citation
Previous work has explored this \cite{author2024keyword}.

% Textual citation (requires natbib)
\citet{author2024keyword} showed that...

% Multiple citations
Several studies \cite{paper1,paper2,paper3} found...

Troubleshooting

DOI Not Found

•Check DOI is correct (no typos)
•Try CrossRef directly: https://doi.org/[DOI]
•For arXiv, use arXiv ID instead

Missing Fields

•Check original source for info
•Some fields are optional (add if available)
•Don't leave required fields empty

Duplicate Keys

•Use more specific keywords
•Add first name initial: smithj2024keyword
•Add venue: smith2024keywordneurips

References

See references/ folder for:

•citation_styles.md: Style guide for different formats