bibcite

Turn an arXiv ID, DOI, paper title, or web page into clean BibTeX, then keep the whole bibliography normalized and deduplicated.

bibcite resolves a paper to its published record when one exists, preserves arXiv links, canonicalizes venue names, and writes the result into a .bib file without breaking existing citation keys. It is built for both terminal use and coding agents that need a dependable alternative to editing BibTeX by hand.

Quick start with an agent

Install the bundled skill so your coding agent knows how to manage citations with bibcite:

npx -y skills add leo1oel/bibcite --skill bibcite --global --yes

Install the CLI once as well, or let the agent install it on the first bibliography task:

uv tool install bibcite-cli

You can then ask your agent to handle the bibliography in plain language:

Add arXiv:1706.03762 to references.bib and cite it in main.tex.
Upgrade the arXiv entries in references.bib to their published versions.
Check and fix references.bib before submission.

The skill tells the agent to call bibcite for every .bib change, read the citation key from its JSON output, and use that exact key in \cite{...}. The agent never needs to guess a key or edit a BibTeX entry by hand.

Use the CLI directly

Install the command from PyPI if you have not already done so:

uv tool install bibcite-cli

Resolve a paper and add it to your bibliography:

bibcite add references.bib 1706.03762

The command prints a machine-readable result, including the stable citation key:

{
  "query": "1706.03762",
  "action": "added",
  "key": "vaswani2017attention",
  "title": "Attention is All you Need",
  "venue": "Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS)",
  "published": true,
  "source": "semanticscholar",
  "file": "references.bib",
  "tidied": true
}

You can now cite it as \cite{vaswani2017attention}. Running the same command again is safe: bibcite detects the existing entry and does not add a duplicate.

When add writes a new entry, it runs bibtex-tidy automatically unless you pass --no-tidy. It uses a globally installed bibtex-tidy command when available and otherwise runs it through npx --yes bibtex-tidy. npx downloads the formatter automatically on first use, so the agent-first setup does not require a separate bibtex-tidy installation. The JSON result reports "tidied": true when formatting succeeds.

If neither bibtex-tidy nor npx is available, or if the formatter fails, the entry remains written but the command exits with code 1 and reports "tidied": false. An "action": "exists" result also reports "tidied": false because no file change occurred, so add skips the formatting pass. Run bibcite tidy references.bib or bibcite fix references.bib when you want to format an existing file.

You can also try a one-off command without installing bibcite:

uvx --from bibcite-cli bibcite get "Attention is all you need"

What it handles

• It accepts arXiv IDs and URLs, arXiv DOIs such as 10.48550/arXiv.1706.03762, standard DOIs, paper titles, and the URL of a web page.
• A web page is cited from what the page says about itself, because no index carries blog posts, documentation, or standards. The entry is @misc with howpublished = {\url{...}}, which every conference .bst prints; @online is biblatex-only and would be dropped. A page with no byline is attributed to its site, and a page with no date takes the year from its own URL when it has one there.
• It searches for a published version before falling back to an arXiv preprint, and it reports when source outages make that check incomplete.
• It canonicalizes journal, conference, and workshop names against the bundled venue table, including year-sensitive names such as NIPS and NeurIPS.
• It assigns the correct BibTeX entry type and field, such as @inproceedings with booktitle or @article with journal.
• It deduplicates by arXiv ID, DOI, exact title, and similar titles from the same first author.
• It upgrades preprints in place while preserving citation keys already used by your LaTeX source.

Commands

Common workflows

Preview a result as BibTeX or JSON:

bibcite get 1706.03762
bibcite get 10.1109/CVPR52688.2022.01167 --json

Add raw BibTeX from the clipboard:

pbpaste | bibcite add references.bib --bibtex -

Replace a bad entry while keeping its current key:

bibcite add references.bib "correct paper title" --key existingKey

Check what would be upgraded without writing the file:

bibcite upgrade references.bib --dry-run

Mark a confirmed preprint-only entry with pubstate = {preprint} if you want check and upgrade to leave it alone.

How resolution works

For arXiv IDs and titles, bibcite collects paper metadata and checks publication sources in a cascade derived from PaperMemory: DBLP, Semantic Scholar, Google Scholar, Crossref, Unpaywall, and OpenAlex. A published match must have the same normalized title or pass a guarded title-drift check, have a plausible publication year, and name a non-preprint venue.

Successful published matches are cached at ~/.cache/bibcite/published.json. Preprint-only results are never cached because a paper may be published later. Use --no-cache or set BIBCITE_NO_CACHE=1 to bypass the cache.

Configuration

Set BIBCITE_STRINGS=/path/to/strings.bib to use your own venue table, or place one at ~/.config/bibcite/strings.bib.

These optional environment variables improve source reliability:

Exit codes and agent use

add, remove, upgrade, check, and fix print JSON on standard output and send diagnostics to standard error. This keeps their output easy to parse from scripts and agents.

Agents should call bibcite add <file> <query> and use the returned key in \cite{...}. They should never modify .bib entries directly because doing so bypasses deduplication, venue normalization, and stable-key handling.

Development

git clone https://github.com/leo1oel/bibcite.git
cd bibcite
uv sync --all-groups
uv run pytest

Install the checkout as an editable command while developing:

uv tool install --editable .

Acknowledgements

Inspired by PaperMemory, with formatting by bibtex-tidy and metadata from arXiv, DBLP, Semantic Scholar, Google Scholar, Crossref, Unpaywall, and OpenAlex.

License

bibcite is available under the MIT License.