Curate and validate BibTeX bibliographies against academic databases.
Curate BibTeX bibliographies with validation against academic databases.
Don't use for: Quick one-off lookups where you don't need validated BibTeX.
bibval validates BibTeX against academic databases:
bibval references.bib # Validate all entries
bibval references.bib -k key1,key2 # Validate specific entries
bibval references.bib --strict # Treat warnings as errors
Databases checked: CrossRef, DBLP, ArXiv, Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, OpenReview, Zenodo
Issues detected:
| Criterion | Requirement |
|---|---|
| bibval clean | Exits 0 with no errors |
| No duplicates | No duplicate keys or DOIs |
| Required fields | All entries have: author, title, year, venue |
| DOIs present | DOIs included where available |
| Criterion | Requirement |
|---|---|
| Low DOI coverage | >20% entries missing DOIs |
| Inconsistent keys | Mix of styles (AuthorYear vs author2024foo) |
| Venue inconsistency | Mix of abbreviations (ICML vs Proc. ICML) |
| Missing seminal works | Obvious gaps a reviewer would notice |
| Criterion | Requirement |
|---|---|
| bibval errors | Year/title/author mismatches |
| Placeholder text | TODO, TBD, placeholder in fields |
| Broken cross-refs | @string or crossref that doesn't resolve |
| Operation | Description |
|---|---|
| Add | Find BibTeX for a paper, validate, append to file |
| Validate | Run bibval on existing file, fix issues |
| Curate | Analyze document for citation needs, build bibliography |
| Clean | Deduplicate, standardize formatting, fill missing DOIs |
Use consistent format: <FirstAuthorLastName><Year><FirstWord>
Examples:
Vaswani2017AttentionSutskever2014SequenceBrown2020LanguageWhen searching for papers:
{
"operation": "add | validate | curate | clean",
"status": "CLEAN | NEEDS_INPUT | ERRORS",
"entries_processed": 0,
"errors": [],
"warnings": [],
"changes": []
}
Bibliography files co-locate with the writing:
project/
├── paper/
│ ├── draft.md
│ ├── references.bib ← bibliography here
│ └── figures/
When reviewing bibval output:
| Category | Action | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| AUTO_FIX | Fix automatically | Year typos, missing DOIs that exist |
| VERIFY | Ask user | Title changes, author spelling |
| ACCEPT | Leave as-is | Old paper without DOI, acceptable warning |