bibchex 0.1.5

Check your BibTeX files for consistency and sanity.

BibCheX is a tool to sanity- and consistency-check your BibTeX reference files. Aside from checks ensuring your preferred style guidelines are met, Bibchex pulls in bibliographic data from sources such as CrossRef and cross-checks your BibTeX files against this data. The documentation contains a list of all available checkers and data sources.

Getting started

This walks you quickly through running BibCheX on your .bib file.

Installation

Installing BibCheX from source should be as easy as running

python setup.py install

in the source folder. Alternatively, you can install BibCheX from PyPI using pip:

pip install bibchex

Configuration

Configuration determines which style rules should be checked for. BibCheX comes with a default configuration which matches my personal taste, but probably not yours. So you can run BibCheX without customizing the config, but you might not be happy with the result.

You can find the default configuration at bibchex/data/default_config.json in the source. Copy that file to ~/.config/bibchex.json or anywhere else. If you did copy it to some arbitrary location, you must pass the path to that file via the --config command line switch.

Have a look at the configuration documentation to see what can be configured.

Running

BibCheX can be run in three modes. In GUI mode, text mode or silent mode. Okay, “GUI” is kind of a lie, it’s more of a TUI. But anyways, it provides progress bars, so yay for GUI mode!

BibCheX expects as first positional argument the path to your .bib file, and as second a path to a (non-existent) HTML file, to which it will write its output. Running BibCheX (in GUI mode) can be as easy as:

bibchex /path/to/my/references.bib /path/to/the/desired/output.html

This should open a text UI with some scrolling log messages and progress bars on the top. Once everything is finished, press any key to close the UI and open /path/to/the/desired/output.html in any browser to have a look at the result.

Running BibCheX without the GUI can be done like this:

bibchex --cli /path/to/my/references.bib /path/to/the/desired/output.html

Remember that you may have to pass your custom configuration JSON file if you have placed in a nonstandard location:

bibchex --cli --config /path/to/your/config.json /path/to/my/references.bib /path/to/the/desired/output.html

Please Note: The (free) crossref API required a valid email address to be set for usage. By default, a dummy address is configured. Please change this to a valid address before actually using BibCheX!