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I am new to BibDesk and Latex. I was wondering if there is a faster way than exporting articles from BibDesk as a .bib file via the file -> export button to integrate those into latex? Isn't there any latex package which directly exports your articles form BibDesk?

So ideally I add a new reference to my BibDesk then copy the \cite tag and finally just rerun make (and other commands recompile latex and it is there.

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I don't really understand your question (and I'm a long time BibDesk user). Do you know how BibTeX (not BibDesk) is supposed to work? You reference your .bib file in your LaTeX document. So there's nothing really to export here. You just tell LaTeX with the \bibliography directive which file contains your references and that's the one you edit with BibDesk. Or are you talking about a better integration between BibDesk and your LaTeX editor? – Simifilm May 10 '12 at 13:45
If you don't mind using jabref, there is one push option which puts the bibtex key in to the editor with a click. – Harish Kumar May 10 '12 at 13:45

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As far as I know, BibDesk saves data in a .bib file, so you don't need to export anything, so long as the database is in a place readable by the TeX programs.

If you save your huge josh.bib file created by BibDesk in the folder

~/Library/texmf/bibtex/bib

(create the structure if some of those folders don't exist, ~ represents your Home), then

\bibliography{josh}

in a LaTeX document will find all citations keys in that file.

Of course a \nocite{*} command would list in the bibliography everything you have in the big database and here's where the "export" function is needed: you can create a particular database from the main one for a specific document. But that's by no means necessary.

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Hi egreg, thanks for that simple solution. I just changed the path of where BibDesk saves its .bib file to the one checked by latex and voila it works :) perfect thanks! – Josh May 10 '12 at 16:27
The other possibility would be to use the BIBINPUTS environment variable, which will tell BibTeX where to look for the .bib file: BIBINPUTS=/path/to/foo.bib bibtex myfile (this is a shell version -- there will be an analogous mechanism if you're calling BibTeX via a GUI) – Norman Gray May 19 '12 at 20:12

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