Disabling URLs in bibliography

Question

I use Mendeley for article management and export the related items to a bib file for referencing in LaTeX documents. I use IEEEtran style and see that the bibliography items include URLs which I don't want to include. The URLs may have URLs like this:

Available: http://www.mendeley.com/research/improved-adaptive-background-mixture-model-realtime-tracking-shadow-detection-6/

As a solution, I can delete the URL in Mendeley and export it again but I want the URLs remain. I only want them to be hidden in the references. Is there a command to disable URLs in bibliography?

P.S.: I'm not interested in typesetting the URLS as given in this question.

Additional information: I've used the following code for the bibliography:

\bibliographystyle{IEEEtran}
\bibliography{IEEEabrv,references}

There's a file named references.bib in the working folder.

Answer 1

I guess you use the IEEEtran bibliography style coming along with the IEEEtran document class. You can easily adapt this style to ignore any url fields in your bibliographic database. To this end, copy the file IEEEtran.bst to your working directory (if it isn't already there) and apply the following patch:

--- IEEEtran.bst.orig
+++ IEEEtran.bst
@@ -403,7 +403,6 @@
   default.ALTinterwordstretchfactor 'ALTinterwordstretchfactor :=
   default.name.format.string 'name.format.string :=
   default.name.latex.cmd 'name.latex.cmd :=
-  default.name.url.prefix 'name.url.prefix :=
 }


@@ -1080,7 +1079,7 @@
   if$
   "\begin{thebibliography}{"  longest.label  * "}" *
   write$ newline$
-  "\providecommand{\url}[1]{#1}"
+  "\def\url#1{}"
   write$ newline$
   "\csname url@samestyle\endcsname"
   write$ newline$

Answer 2

If you use biblatex, there's an option called url which can be set to url = false. There are also isbn, doi etc., similar options. If you are not using biblatex. I don't think there's an easy way get what you want. The traditional bibtex uses a very different language to define the bib style.

Answer 3

I have a cheeky solution to this. I grep "url" in my bibtex file with the invert switch -v -- in effect, it gives me a new bibtex file without any url data. In other words,

grep -v "url =" file.bib > newfile.bib

Answer 4

The IEEEtran.bst v1.14 introduces a new option to disable URLs. Now you can create a bib file containing the following:

@IEEEtranBSTCTL{MyBSTcontrol,
    CTLuse_url = "no",
}

Include this bib file along with other bib files, and invoke it via bstctlcite

\begin{document}
\bstctlcite{MyBSTcontrol}
.
.

All URLs in the references will be gone.

Answer 5

You can remove URLs from a bibliography by opening Mendeley Desktop and clicking View >Citation Style >More Styles, and set Include URLs and Date Accessed in Bibliographies to Only for Webpages.

Reference: http://support.mendeley.com/customer/portal/articles/170063-removing-urls-from-bibliographies-using-the-word-plugin

(This removes URLs from bibliographies created using the plugins and not from the .bib files!)

Answer 6

I happen to have the IEEEtran.bst version 1.11 which is quite old actually.

%% BibTeX Bibliography Style file for IEEE Journals and Conferences (unsorted)
%% Version 1.11 (2003/04/02)

What worked for me really is following

1) Edit the "IEEEtran.bst" file to remove the url prefix by changing

FUNCTION {bbl.urlprefix}{ "[Online]. Available:" }

to

FUNCTION {bbl.urlprefix}{ "" }

2) Add this line

\def\url#1{}

before the bibliography

\bibliographystyle{IEEEtran}
\bibliography{IEEEabrv,library}

Answer 7

In IEEEtran.bst Version 1.14 (2015/08/26), there is defaults variables for controling the BST style.

At line 87, you find :

% #0 turns off the display of urls
% #1 enables
FUNCTION {default.is.use.url} { #1 }

Just replace the #1 with #0.

Answer 8

Another easy way to remove the URLs without modifying the .bst files is to open your bibliography (.bib) file and do a find/replace all on instances of "url". Replace them with "%url". When you build your document, the bibliography interprets all the url's as comments and leaves them out.

It's not exactly a permanent fix, but it's an easy one to repeat any time you update your references.

Answer 9

You can remove fields if you use biblatex, use this in your preamble (remove \bibliographystyle{IEEEtran})

\usepackage[style=ieee]{biblatex}
\AtEveryBibitem{%
  \clearfield{issn} % Remove issn
  \clearfield{doi} % Remove doi

  \ifentrytype{online}{}{% Remove url except for @online
    \clearfield{url}
  }
}

Answer 10

How is the url typeset in the bbl file? If it is using \url then you could locally redefine \url inside the bibliography to do nothing, or perhaps redefine it to take two args and do nothing, then it will eat the url and a following period. you can add a @preamble string to add the redefinition into the bibfile, and from there into the bbl file via bibtex.

Answer 11

That may be helpful. Consider the following entry in IEEEtran.bst file. Delete the line format.url output.

FUNCTION {article} { 
  std.status.using.comma
  start.entry
  if.url.alt.interword.spacing
  format.authors "author" output.warn
  name.or.dash
  format.article.title "title" output.warn
  format.journal "journal" bibinfo.check "journal" output.warn
  format.volume output
  format.number.if.use.for.article output
  format.pages output
  format.date "year" output.warn
  format.note output
  %format.url output
  fin.entry
  if.url.std.interword.spacing
}

Answer 12

Editors like TexWorks allow the replacement of regular expressions. You can open the .bib file and search and replace the following expression with nothing.

(url|doi) = \{[^\{]+\},\n*

Works fine for me.

Answer 13

I had the same problem, and I solve it with the following R code using the "bibtex" package.

library(bibtex)
bib.list <- read.bib("./data/sample.bib")
bib.list[1:length(bib.list)]$url <- NULL
write.bib(bib.list, "./data/sample_no_url.bib", append = FALSE, verbose = TRUE)

Answer 14

For those who use "Template article for Elsevier's document class `elsarticle'", here is a solution for hiding the url links in the reference part in the pdf file:

1. in the ENTRY object located at the beginning of the .bst file, comment the "url" entry.

2. edit the .bst file related with your .tex file: in the .bst file, comment out every write.url command that is inside different functions of different types of articles.

The above procedures should also apply to other feilds such as "doi", "isbn", etc..