autobib 0.8.1

Description:

autobib 0.8.1

autobib



autobib automatically fetches BibTeX entries from online databases (currently Inspire and ADS) based on references that were added to the LaTeX document but not yet to the .bib file. The automatically fetched entries are appended to the first .bib file defined in your LaTeX source (first entry of \bibliography{...}). For this to work, the cite key has to be a key used by the online database.
In other words, you still need to look up a citation online and copy the cite key to your LaTeX file, but you don't have to also copy the whole BibTeX entry to your local .bib file (essentially adding it twice), since autobib does the latter for you.
autobib only appends new entries to your .bib file and otherwise leaves it as is. Using it is therefore safe.
Installation and usage
pip install autobib
This installs a new script called bibtex-autobib, which is a drop-in replacement of the original bibtex command. The easiest way to make it work automatically with tooling like latexmk is to create a symlink
ln -s /path/to/bibtex-autobib /some/path/bibtex
where /some/path/bibtex comes before the path in which the original bibtex command is located in the PATH environment variable. Be careful that you do not override the original bibtex command.
After doing that, you can check whether the command bibtex is calling autobib by calling bibtex --version on the command-line. You should see something like this
autobib 0.6.0
BibTeX 0.99d (TeX Live 2020)
[...]

If this is not the case, then you may have to change the order of search paths in the PATH environment variable.
ADS token
No extra steps are needed to download from Inspire, but to download from ADS you need to follow these instructions to get an API token. Export this token in your shell as ADS_TOKEN, e.g. export ADS_TOKEN=<insert token here>.