BibBoost

A CLI tool to update BibTeX files with conference versions of papers using the DBLP Computer Science Bibliography.

Features

• Interactive paper selection - Choose from multiple versions with detailed information
• Complete metadata replacement - Uses DBLP's complete BibTeX entries
• Smart preprint detection - Only processes arXiv/preprint entries
• Backup protection - Creates backups before modifying files
• Dry-run mode - Preview changes without writing files

Installation

Using uv (recommended)

uv tool install bibboost

From source

git clone <repository-url>
cd bib-updater
uv sync

Usage

Basic Usage

# Interactive update with complete metadata
bibboost papers.bib

# Preview changes without modifying the file
bibboost papers.bib --dry-run --verbose

# Save to a different output file
bibboost papers.bib --output updated_papers.bib

Options

• --output/-o: Specify output file (default: updates input file)
• --dry-run: Preview changes without writing files
• --verbose/-v: Show detailed progress
• --backup/--no-backup: Create backup file (default: True)

How It Works

1. Parse BibTeX file - Identifies preprint/arXiv entries (skips published papers)
2. Search DBLP - Finds all available versions of each paper
3. Interactive selection - Shows detailed paper information for user choice:
   • Original BibTeX entry details
   • All found versions with authors, venues, and years
   • Visual separators for easy scanning
4. Complete replacement - Uses DBLP's complete BibTeX citation
5. Preserve citation keys - Keeps your original IDs for existing citations

Interactive Selection

When multiple versions are found, you'll see:

📄 Found multiple versions for: Attention Is All You Need

📚 Original BibTeX entry:
   ID: attention2017
   Title: Attention Is All You Need
   Authors: Ashish Vaswani and others
   Journal: arXiv preprint arXiv:1706.03762
   Year: 2017
   arXiv: 1706.03762

══════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════

? Choose the version to use:
 → Attention is All you Need
    Authors: Ashish Vaswani, Noam M. Shazeer, Niki Parmar, et al.
    Venue: Neural Information Processing Systems (2017) - Conference
    ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

   Skip (keep original version)

Complete Metadata Replacement

The tool uses DBLP's BibTeX export to get complete, properly formatted entries:

Before (arXiv preprint):

@article{attention2017,
  title={Attention Is All You Need},
  author={Ashish Vaswani and others},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:1706.03762},
  year={2017}
}

After (complete conference version):

@article{attention2017,
  author = {Ashish Vaswani and Noam M. Shazeer and Niki Parmar and Jakob Uszkoreit and Llion Jones and Aidan N. Gomez and Lukasz Kaiser and I. Polosukhin},
  booktitle = {Neural Information Processing Systems},
  pages = {5998-6008},
  title = {Attention is All you Need},
  year = {2017}
}

Benefits:

• ✅ Complete author lists (not truncated)
• ✅ Exact venue names and formatting
• ✅ Page numbers, volumes, and other metadata
• ✅ Proper BibTeX formatting from authoritative source
• ✅ No manual field mapping required