Consider providing bibtex-tidy

[sbrugman]

There is this tool bibtex-tidy that helps formatting and checking bib files, improving the overal quality (e.g. prevent duplicates in DOI and keys, consistent ordering of keys). We could consider providing this tool as a utility to authors.

The author instructions contain pointers on using bib, namely:

All citations that have DOIs should include those DOIs in the paper's references section, see mybib.bib.

Moreover, scoobies provides a check references command. This feature would be complementary.

One additional sentence could point towards this utility.

Possible implementation

Alternatively, the pre-commit hook seems like a way to help authors even further, without having tight integration (pre-commit points to the repository).

.pre-commit-config.yaml:

repos:
-   repo: https://github.com/FlamingTempura/bibtex-tidy
    rev: v1.8.5
    hooks:
    - id: bibtex-tidy
      args:
      - '--curly'
      - '--numeric'
      - '--tab'
      - '--align=13'
      - '--duplicates=key,doi'
      - '--no-escape'
      - '--sort-fields=title,shorttitle,author,year,month,day,journal,booktitle,location,on,publisher,address,series,volume,number,pages,doi,isbn,issn,url,urldate,copyright,category,note,metadata'
      - '--no-remove-dupe-fields'

Format and check .bib files in the repository:
pre-commit run --all-files

Happy to contribute a PR if this feature is deemed desirable.

[deniederhut]

Ooh thanks for the suggestion! We're all pretty swamped right now getting everything reviewed in time for the conference -- is it okay if we revisit this after the conference?

[sbrugman]

No problem, looking forward to the conference