Benefits

• Make the bib file portable. You can clone this repository when writing a conference abstract and thesis/dissertation.
• different styles in accordance with journal specifications

Passive usage

If you just want to use the bib file (e.g. writing a conference abstract),

1. Clone this repository next to your .tex file, or simply copy the content of 'Refs.bib' to a file
2. If not included, include the siunitx package for a proper and consistent rendering of the numbers and units. Add

\usepackage{siunitx}

in the preamble of your tex file. 3. Specify in the .tex file:

\bibliographystyle{unsrt}           % sort the references as they appear in the text
\bibliography{./references/Refs}

Active usage: Python formatter

You can format your own bib file with the format.py script. It depends on bibtexparser module. We recommend to use it in a virtual Python environment:

python -m venv .venv

and activate the virtual environment by sourcing the script <venv>/Scripts/Activate.ps1. If you use pip, install the dependencies as:

python -m pip install --upgrade pip
pip install -r requirements.txt

Then run the format script:

python format.py

This tool features:

1. Consistently sorts the keys 'title', 'author', 'journal', ... for all entries
2. Sort the entries in alphabetical order
3. Align indentation
4. Recognize accented letters and convert to the LaTeX-conform syntax

If the conversion fails with a UnicodeDecodeError, make sure that the Python default encoding is set to UTF-8. The setting can be displayed by the following script:

import os
import sys
import locale
print(os.environ.get("PYTHONIOENCODING"))
print(sys.getdefaultencoding())
print(sys.getfilesystemencoding())
print(sys.stdout.encoding)
print(locale.getpreferredencoding())

Examples where manual adjustment is needed

1. If an auther's first name is abbreviated as M.L., this will not be recognized as a name with two first name initials. Use the regex

(?<=\.)\w(?=\.)

in VS Code to find such cases and amend it to M. L..

2. Abbreviation of journal names Journal --> J. Japanese --> Jpn.