bibtex-hygiene

BibTeX Hygiene

A clean bibliography is a correctness issue, not cosmetics: duplicate entries inflate reference counts, missing fields render as "?" in the PDF, lowercase acronyms signal carelessness to reviewers, and a wrong DOI sends readers to someone else's paper.

Workflow

1. Lint. Run the bundled linter on every .bib the manuscript uses:

   python scripts/bib_lint.py references.bib
   python scripts/bib_lint.py references.bib --json > bib-report.json   # for programmatic triage
   

   Exit code 0 clean, 1 findings, 2 unparseable input.

1. Fix errors first, in this order:

   • duplicate-key: two entries share a key, so LaTeX silently uses the first. Rename one and update \cite{} calls (grep -rn "\\cite.*{oldkey" *.tex).
   • duplicate-work: the same paper under two keys (same DOI or title). Keep one, repoint citations.
   • missing-field: add the field from the publisher page or Crossref, never from memory.
   • doi-format / year-format / author-format: correct from the authoritative record.

2. Then warnings:

   • title-case: wrap acronyms, proper nouns and chemical/gene symbols in braces: title = {{BERT}: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers}, {Bayesian}, {CRISPR}-{Cas9}, {\textit{E. coli}}. Brace the word, not the whole title. Whole-title braces defeat sentence-case styles.
   • doi-url: store bare DOIs (10.1038/s41586-021-03819-2). Styles add the resolver.
   • author-others: list every author when there are fewer than three.

3. Resolve preprints. For every preprint note, check whether a peer-reviewed version exists (search the title on Crossref/OpenAlex or use the citation-verification skill). Cite the published version and keep the arXiv ID in eprint if the venue allows.

4. Normalize (optional, safe mechanical fixes only: bare DOIs, -- page ranges, consistent field order):

   python scripts/bib_lint.py references.bib --fix references.clean.bib
   diff references.bib references.clean.bib   # review before replacing
   

5. Verify the build. Compile and read the log: grep -i "warning.*citation\|undefined" main.log. Every \cite must resolve and no entry should render with ??.

Conventions worth enforcing

Topic	Rule
Keys	authorYEARword, lowercase ASCII, e.g. vaswani2017attention. Never reuse a key for a different work
Authors	Last, First and Last, First. Corporate authors in double braces: {{World Health Organization}}
Venues	One spelling per venue across the file (pick full name or ISO4 abbreviation per the journal's style)
Conference papers	@inproceedings with booktitle, not @article with journal
Software/data	@software / @dataset (BibLaTeX) or @misc with version, doi/url, year
Unicode	Keep UTF-8 with biber; for classic BibTeX escape accents ({\"u})
URLs + DOI	If a DOI exists, drop the publisher URL; keep url only for web-only sources (+ urldate)

Anti-patterns

• Generating BibTeX from memory or from an LLM. Always export from the publisher, Crossref (https://api.crossref.org/works/{doi}/transform/application/x-bibtex), DBLP or a reference manager.
• Copying Google Scholar BibTeX blindly: it often lacks DOIs, uses wrong entry types and mangles capitalization.
• Wrapping the whole title in double braces to "fix" capitalization.
• Leaving note = {Accessed ...} on DOI-bearing articles.

Related skills

• citation-verification: checks that every entry matches a real record (catches hallucinated references).
• reference-manager-interop: converts between Zotero/Mendeley/EndNote exports, RIS, CSL-JSON and BibTeX.
• citation-management: search and retrieve references from literature databases.