How can I access specific elements of a Bibtex entry in my Latex document?

Question

I keep all my sources in the one Bibtex file, and noticed in Jabref that there's a "review" field.

I thought this would be a handy place to keep notes while doing a literature review, and was wondering how I could go about making a document which showed this review field.

Basically, I'd like to use this as a kind of annotated bibliography.

So is there some way I could access this field in a Latex document? Like:

\cite{Barniv:1985}.review() 

Or something to that effect.

Answer 1

This field is not usually accessed by the normal bibliography styles. The biblatex package, however, has an annotation field and a bibliography style designed for annotated bibliographies.

In JabRef, you first need to change the name of field that is used by the review tab. You can do this by choosing Set General Fields from the Options menu. This will bring up the following window:

Change the line that says Review:review to Review:annotation. This makes anything you enter into the Review tab of an entry into a bibtex field named annotation (which biblatex recognizes.) Note that this will not change any existing review fields to annotation; that would need to be done separately with a search and replace.

Once you've done this, you can now use the biblatex reading bibliography style to print out the annotations with the bibliography.

Here's a sample document.

\documentclass[12pt,letterpaper]{article}
\usepackage[style=reading,entryhead=false,annotation=true,backend=biber]{biblatex}
\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@book{Saussure1995,
    Author = {Ferdinand de Saussure},
    Origyear = {1916},
    Publisher = {Payot},
    Title = {Cours de Linguistique G{\'e}n{\'e}rale},
    Year = {1995},
    Annotation = {This is a classic of linguistics.}}

@book{Labov1972,
    Address = {Philadelphia},
    Author = {William Labov},
    Publisher = {University of Pennsylvania Press},
    Title = {Sociolinguistic Patterns},
    Year = {1972},
    Annotation = {This is another classic of linguistics.}}
\end{filecontents}
\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}
\begin{document}
\nocite{*}
\printbibliography
\end{document}

The formatting leaves something to be desired. You would need to customize the formatting yourself to get things to look a bit nicer, but all of the pieces are there. See the biblatex manual for more details.