R: Convert Between Bibliography Formats

rbibutils-package {rbibutils}

R Documentation

Convert Between Bibliography Formats

Description

Converts between a number of bibliography formats, including 'BibTeX', 'BibLaTeX' and 'Bibentry'. Includes a port of the 'bibutils' utilities by Chris Putnam <https://sourceforge.net/projects/bibutils/>. Supports all bibliography formats and character encodings implemented in 'bibutils'.

Details

Package rbibutils provides an R port of the bibutils programs plus additional facilities. The main function, bibConvert, offers all conversions between bibliography formats supported by library bibutils. In addition, package rbibutils converts to and from R's bibentry Bibtex-based bibliography format.

The core functionality is provided by the bibutils programs which convert between various bibliography formats using a common MODS XML intermediate format, see the source cited below.

Currently we provide the function bibConvert for conversion between supported bibliography formats. For complete list of formats supported by the package, see the documentation of the original bibutils library.

readBib and writeBib import/export BiBTeX files. readBibentry and writeBibentry import/export R source files in which the references are represented by bibentry() calls. These functions are wrappers around bibConvert.

All encodings supported by the bibutils library are available for bibConvert.

Further functionality may be provided in future releases, in particular, the underlying C functions could be exposed to package authors. Further R wrappers may be added, as well. However, the scope of the package will remain conversion between formats based on bibutils and manipulation of the MODS XML intermediate format. rbibutils can be used also as an alternative to package bibtex (Francois 2020). For bibliography management see package RefManager (McLean 2017). For citations in R documentation (Rd or roxygen2) see package Rdpack (Boshnakov 2020).

The only external dependency is package xml2.

Up to version 1.4 of rbibutils conversion to "bibentry" was done in R using package xml2. From version 1.4.1 this conversion is done in the C code, just as all other conversions, so xml2 is no longer needed.

Note

The bibutils library is included in a number of software packages. These include include pandoc and a library for Haskell. Executable programs for conversion are available for Linux distributions but seem not easily available for Windows. Executable and libraries can also be generated out-of-the-box from the bibutils disribution (on Windows under MSYS).

Author(s)

Georgi N. Boshnakov (R code and R port of bibutils), Chris Putnam (author of bibutils library)

References

Boshnakov GN (2020). “Rdpack: Update and Manipulate Rd Documentation Objects.” doi: 10.5281/zenodo.3925612 (URL: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3925612), R package version 1.0.0.

Francois R. (2020). bibtex: Bibtex Parser. R package version 0.4.2.2. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=bibtex.

McLean MW (2017). “RefManageR: Import and Manage BibTeX and BibLaTeX References in R.” _The Journal of Open Source Software_. doi: 10.21105/joss.00338 (URL: https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.00338).