Bibcac: a Perl script for classifying references in a Bibtex bibliography

In my previous post I proposed a script for updating a Bibtex file with publication data. Here is now a completely independent script for organizing the references in a Bibtex file.

To do this, we will not modify the Bibtex file, but rather create an auxiliary file where we will associate categories and comments to a number of the references. For instance, if we want to associate the category "Topological Recursion" and the comment "This article..." to the article whose Bibtex key is "cer12", we will add the following text in the auxiliary file:

\ArticleLabel{cer12}
\ArticleCategory{Topological Recursion}

This article ...

Why would we want to have such categories and comments? Categories are particularly useful if they match some classification of the articles, whether as files in a computer, or as physical printouts. If you keep articles in a number of folders, the program will enable you to find in which folder a given article is, and to list the articles in a given folder. As for comments, keeping them in a centralized file is safer than having them as annotations (handwritten or electronic) on a copy of an article, which might well get lost.

Bibpup: a Perl script for updating Bibtex files using Inspire

Bibtex is a nice way to manage bibliographies, by collecting the bibliographical data of many articles in one Bibtex file, and then citing only some of these articles in a given document. However, the bibliographical data of an article can change when the article gets published in a journal. If the article was initially entered in the Bibtex file as a preprint, the Bibtex file must then be updated.
Here I propose a Perl script which does this automatically using the search engine Inspire, which is the standard search engine for high-energy physics and related fields.

Of course I do not believe that it is very relevant or useful to know whether an article is published and in which journal, but journals typically require such data to be displayed in bibliographies. In any case, the decision to display publication data or not is done at the level of the bibliography style file -- the Bibtex file itself is only a database, which should be as complete as possible.

So what does the script do? the script takes a Bibtex file, and for each entry which has no publication data, but an eprint field with an Arxiv number, a request is sent to Inspire. If publication data are found, then the entry is modified to include them. (The rest of the entry, and in particular the key, are not changed.)