Command line tool for citations and bibliographies

I was working very hard on the new version of citeproc-java lately and I’m happy to announce that it has just been released. The highlights in version 0.6 are:

• The binary distribution of citeproc-java contains a command line tool that can be used to generate citations and bibliographies without setting up a complete development environment. Just download and extract the zip file and then run citeproc-java -b references.bib -s ieee to create a bibliography in ieee style for your BibTeX input file. This feature makes the library very useful even for non-programmers.
• The new Mendeley connector allows you to use documents stored in Mendeley Web as input for citations and bibliographies. Of course, this feature also works on the command line.
• The library has been tested with the CSL test suite. All 750+ tests run successfully! I put a lot of work into this to bring citeproc-java on par with other CSL processors.
• Performance has been improved a lot.

I particularly like the new command line tool that can be used to generate citations and bibliographies from various sources such as BibTeX files or your Mendeley Web catalog. I expect the tool to be quite useful for the following users:

• Authors who want a quick way to preview citations or bibliographies in various styles
• Citation Style Language style authors who want to test their style files very quickly

In order to use the tool, you just have to download citeproc-java and extract the ZIP file. You can then run the following command to convert a BibTeX file to a bibliography using the ieee style, for example:

citeproc-java -b references.bib

If you want to generate a bibliography that only contains items with certain citation IDs (for example Fowler_2010 and Kisker_2012), use the following command:

citeproc-java -b references.bib Fowler_2010 Kisker_2012

The tool will even notify you if you misspelled a citation ID:

citeproc-java: unknown citation id: Fwler_2010
Did you mean `Fowler_2010'?

If you want to connect to your Mendeley Web account, use the following command:

citeproc-java --mendeley Fowler_2010 Kisker_2012

The tool has a lot more to offer. For more information run citeproc-java --help or read the library’s documentataion.

Posted by Michel Krämer
on 25 October 2013