Hacker News Reader

Comment by Eddy_Viscosity2 | Hacker News Reader

I use zotero with the better bibtex extension. But when I finalize a document, I use jabref and its 'make a new library from .aux file' tool which can then create a .bib file with only the references used in the document. Much easier to archive than my full zotero library with thousands of entries. Also makes it easier to fine tune any edits to the .bib references for that specific document and template.

View on HN

Same here, except that I gather all the bibliography entries into a Zotero collection organized by paper and only export that to the latex workspace rather than using JabRef. Works a treat and keeps the size of the .bib file small.

How do you do the collection per paper? Is that manual or automatable?

For me, that's manual—I make sure everything I've cited is in the .bib file, and move papers into another collection if they end up not being relevant for a particular paper.

This is probably an automatable task, but it's generally not too much of a burden to do manually. I add a 'needs-review' tag to papers I've identified in a literature review, and categorize it when I get around to reading it.

If Zotero, or more appropriately better-bibtex, had a 'make collection from .aux file' option, than that would be fantastic. For some documents there can be such a number of references that doing this manually would be a chore. But having that collection in zotero would be useful by itself as a resource. Maybe I'll head over and make that suggestion...

I just use Zotero to copy-paste bibtex references into a .bib file as I go along. You can do this using the "bibtex generic" citation style.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com