Normally, LaTeX will only create references for the BibTeX entries cited in the text. Is there a way of extracting these entries into a different .bib
file automatically? For example if I have a .bib
file with two entries, and only one is cited in a particular text, I need a way of creating a new .bib
file with just that reference.
-
2For Mac users of BibDesk, there is BBL to BIB with BibDesk.– Adam LiterSep 19, 2013 at 3:08
-
2For Windows, JabRef provides this capacity: see [here][1] [1]: tex.stackexchange.com/questions/98370/…– user59315Jul 18, 2014 at 14:10
-
might be a duplicate of tex.stackexchange.com/questions/417/…– lenzFeb 23, 2015 at 0:09
-
1BBL to BIB seems cool but does not seem to be compatible with biber/biblatex.– Stefan MüllerNov 29, 2018 at 9:18
10 Answers
With a TeX Live distribution (possibly also with MiKTeX) there is a bibexport
program. Assuming your document is myarticle.tex
, you have to compile it normally and then you call
bibexport -o extracted.bib myarticle.aux
where extracted.bib
is the name that you want to give to your new .bib
file.
Notice that you have to give the extension .aux
(or no extension at all).
Then you have to change the name of the .bib
file in your document, in order to use extracted.bib
.
-
8
-
9Although this falls outside of the scope of the question, perhaps a brief word about how this tool does not work with
biber
-driven bibliographies (or with.bib
files that usebiblatex
fields such asdate
instead ofyear
) is in order.– jonFeb 15, 2013 at 16:29 -
3@jon
bibexport
uses BibTeX for doing its job. The manual tells how to add new fields (section 1.4). Forbiblatex
/Biber compatibility the script should look not only for\citation
commands in theaux
file but also for\abx@aux@cite
.– egregFeb 15, 2013 at 16:42 -
7@egreg -- Right. I was thinking more for people who look at your answer, but don't realize why
bibexport
isn't working for them; most of them are not going to be modifyingbibexport.sh
. Another problem that might arise is if you use non-standard entry types (from BibTeX's perspective). I use@Collectio{<key>,...
, e.g., for essay collections; that comes through as@{<key>,...
.– jonFeb 15, 2013 at 20:02 -
+1 for the usage example – the
bibexport
help page doesn't mention that the main argument is the .aux file (it might be obvious, but wasn't for me).– lenzFeb 23, 2015 at 0:05
jabref
can do this in both command line and gui modes.
First gui mode:
Keep your master.bib
file open in jabref. Then in Tools
→ New subdatase based on AUX file
to get
Here select the .aux
file, click parse
, and select
and the generate
. You should get a sub database opened in jabref. Save it.
From command line, assuming that you take care of paths do this:
jabref.jar -a filename[.aux],newBibFile[.bib]
See also command line options to jabref.
-
4In contrast to the
bibexport
-solution above, this one works when working withbiblatex
andbiber
.– FlorianJan 16, 2018 at 10:30
This is a supplement to pavel's answer which aims to address an issue raised in the comments. It is therefore a more specific solution than the one there: the simpler command will work fine if you don't need to resolve crossref
fields in .bib
entries.
In order to resolve crossref
fields in a .bib
file when using biblatex
/biber
, you need to tell biber
what to do.
Given <filename>.tex
, run:
pdflatex <filename>.tex
biber --output_format=bibtex --output_resolve <filename>.bcf
Where latex
, xelatex
, lualatex
etc. can be substituted for pdflatex
as appropriate. So long as it generates your .bcf
it is fine.
With biblatex
/biber
you can use
biber document-base-name.bcf --output_format=bibtex
To resolve crossref
fields, add the option --output-resolve-crossrefs
.
-
1
-
In addition to egreg's answer, I'd like to point out an alternative solution. Nelson Beebe has developed utilities called bibextract
, citetags
and citefind
to handle sub-bibliography databases. You can obtain them here.
In this case, you would compile the document normally and then type in a shell
citetags myarticle.aux > myarticle-tags
citefind myarticle-tags mybib.bib > mysubbib.bib
The first command prints all the citation keys used in your .tex
, while the second selects all the entries from my bib.bib
with keys from myarticle-tags
. Of course, one can easily write a script to merge the two commands if needed.
Although it works in a similar fashion as bibexport
, this solution has the advantage that it does not delete the biblatex
fields such as date
, while bibexport
does by default as mentioned in the comments. It also works with biblatex
if you use bibtex
as a backend, but as far as I know, it does not if you use biber
.
I thought I'd chime in since this came up for me when searching, and none of the given answers worked for me.
As comments allude to, the bibexport
program doesn't seem to be included in some LaTeX distributions anymore (it's certainly not in the texlive version I'm using).
I also tried the citetags
/citefind
commands described by @Corentin but they produced an empty file as output. I don't use biber
or OSX either, so the other answers didn't help.
I then found that bibtool
can do this, as follows:
bibtool -x article.aux -o NewBib.bib
It also turns out that this answer has already been given at https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/136839/89790
I manage to do it with JabRef 4.3.1 using the command line only. It works in Windows 10 as well. The answer provided by @user11232 is out of date. The right command is:
jabref.jar -n -a old_ref.aux,new_ref.bib old_ref.bib
-n
means we do not use the GUI and the output will be in new_ref.bib
.
You can find jabref.jar
on the new website of JabRef. The documentation for the command-line usage is also updated in a new place.
-
Of all the solutions presented in this thread, this is the only one that reliably extracts all used references from my bibliography into a small bibliography. Jul 21, 2020 at 20:24
Corentin's solution worked for my case where I needed to combine cited references from multiple .tex documents into one bib file. I had trouble installing bibextract
on OSX for two reasons: 1) nawk is not installed by default and 2) the CHECKSUM command in the makefile prevented the sh and awk files from being installed. After running, ./configure
, modifify the Makefile as follows:
change:
SEDCMD = $(SED) -e 's=@LIBDIR@=$(LIBDIR)=g' \
-e 's=@BINDIR@=$(BINDIR)=g' \
-e 's=/bin/sed=$(SED)=g'
to
SEDCMD = $(SED) -e 's=@LIBDIR@=$(LIBDIR)=g' \
-e 's=@BINDIR@=$(BINDIR)=g' \
-e 's=/bin/sed=$(SED)=g' \
-e 's=nawk -f=awk -f=g'
then change
$(SEDCMD) $$f.sh | $(CHECKSUM) > $(BINDIR)/$$f ; \
$(SEDCMD) $$f.awk | $(CHECKSUM) > $(LIBDIR)/$$f.awk ; \
$(SEDCMD) $$f.man | $(CHECKSUM) > $(MANDIR)/$$f.$(MANEXT) ; \
to
$(SEDCMD) $$f.sh > $(BINDIR)/$$f ; \
$(SEDCMD) $$f.awk > $(LIBDIR)/$$f.awk ; \
$(SEDCMD) $$f.man > $(MANDIR)/$$f.$(MANEXT) ; \
then run sudo make install
and bibextract
will work as noted above.
If you use WinEdt as the front end to your TeX distribution, I suggest you download and install the bibMacros package (if you haven't already done so). Upon installation, you will see a new ribbon item, labelled "BibTeX". In the tex file that generated the bibliography, click on the "BibTeX" ribbon item to open a drop-down list of further items, and then on the "Extract from Aux" item. These actions let you create a new bib file that contains just the items that are cited in the document.
Complete steps to use "bibexport" for 'extracting only the cited references of a bigger .bib file'. Need Unix environment.
Download the bibexport from here. The important files are 'bibexport.dtx' and 'bibexport.ins'.
In the terminal build the '.ins' file using latex. command: latex bibexport.ins. I am assuming that the 'latex' package is already installed in your system.
This will generate a bunch of files named 'bibexport.sh', 'expcites.bst', 'expkeys.bst', 'export.bst' and log file.
Copy all three '.bst' files and 'bibexport.sh' to the folder where you are writing the article in latex. Also, change the permission of the 'bibexport.sh' file to executable e.g, 'chmod 755 bibexport.sh'.
If you have already compiled(successfully) your article, 'MyArticle.tex', in latex then you should have a file in '.aux' extension. If not, then compile your 'MyArticle.tex' file first using 'latex MyArticle.tex' and 'bibtex MyArticle.aux'. Do this a few times until the compilation finishes without any errors or warnings.
Now it's time to extract the "cited" only references from the "big" bibliography file say 'BibliographyAll.bib'. Use the command " ./bibexport.sh -o ./BibliographyForThisPaper.bib ./MyArticle.aux" in the terminal.
A file named 'BibliographyThisPaper.bib' will be generated which contains only the references that has been used in the article.
You can use this file in your main latex file. \bibliography{./BibliographyForThisPaper}. For other options and usages follow the manual of bibexport which also comes with the package, just you have to build it. Do "pdflatex ./bibexport.dtx"
-
Before installing by hand, check if the package is available prebuilt for your TeX distribution (or as a package for your system).– vonbrandFeb 20, 2020 at 22:45