Bib Scrape

Preparing a BibTeX file for publication is a very error-prone and tedious process. The entries must be correct, consistent and nicely formatted. I was never happy with the results produced by any of the BibTeX scraping systems that I looked at so I’ve written my own. It collects BibTeX entries from the websites of computer-science academic publishers, and I use it personally to make preparing my BibTeX files easier. Currently it supports

• ACM,
• Springer,
• Science Direct,
• IEEE Computer Society,
• IEEE Explore,
• Cambridge Journals (e.g. Journal of Functional Programming),
• JSTOR,
• IOS Press, and
• Wiley.

In addition, this scraper fixes common problems with the BibTeX that these services provide. For example, it fixes:

• the handling of Unicode and other formatting (e.g. subscripts) in titles;
• the incorrect use of the ‘issue’ field instead of the ‘number’ field;
• the format of the ‘doi’ and ‘pages’ fields;
• the use of macros for the ‘month’ field; and
• numerous miscellaneous problems with specific publishers.

Download

This tool is currently available as a limited public release (basically a semi-closed beta). If you are interested in giving it a try, let me know and I’ll send you the download link.

Requirements

• Perl and the following modules
  • Algorithm::Diff
  • Class::Struct
  • HTML::Entities
  • HTML::HeadParser
  • Text::BibTeX
  • WWW::Mechanize
  • XML::Parser