citekeep

Clean a reference once. Reuse it in every LaTeX project.

You write several papers at once, with different co-authors. Each has its own .bib. The same reference gets typed again in each of them, a little differently every time, and the one you cleaned up two years ago sits in a folder you have since archived.

citekeep gives you one canonical library — a plain .bib file you own — and materialises each project's bibliography from it without leaving your editor. It searches the project first, then your library, then zbMATH, with CrossRef as a fallback.

Three things follow from that:

• Your co-authors need nothing. The project keeps an ordinary, self-contained .bib, and their citation keys are never rewritten.
• It works offline. A reference met once stays searchable, and metadata corrected once is never repaired a second time.
• It refuses rather than guesses. When the evidence does not settle whether two records are one work, citekeep says so and writes nothing.

Project (●) first. Personal library (○) next. zbMATH and CrossRef only when needed.

What it is not

Not a Zotero replacement, a PDF manager, a note-taking system, or a hosted collaboration platform. citekeep manages the flow of bibliographic records and leaves the rest to tools that already do it well: Emacs and Citar for reading notes and PDF links, git and an ordinary .bib for collaboration.

Install

uv tool install citekeep
citekeep init --library ~/bibliography/master.bib

No runtime dependencies — everything is standard library. Requires Python 3.11.

If you already have a library, do not initialise a second one: point citekeep at the existing file instead.

Documentation

citekeep.readthedocs.io — a tutorial for the first project, guides for the day-to-day, the command and API reference, and the reasoning behind the design.

Licence

MIT.