bibmanager

The Next Standard in BibTeX Management

Build Status Documentation Status Latest Version conda License DOI

Author:

Patricio Cubillos and contributors (see Contributors)

Contact:

pcubillos[at]fulbrightmail.org

Organizations:

Space Research Institute (IWF)

Web Site:

https://github.com/pcubillos/bibmanager

Date:

Apr 22, 2026

Features

bibmanager is a Python 3.10+ command-line based application to facilitate the management of BibTeX entries, allowing the user to:

  • Unify all BibTeX entries into a single database

  • Automate .bib file generation when compiling a LaTeX project

  • Automate duplicate detection and updates from arXiv to peer-reviewed

  • Clean up (remove duplicates, ADS update) any external bibfile (since version 1.1.2)

  • Keep a database of the entries’ PDFs and fetch PDFs from ADS (since version 1.2)

  • Browse interactively through the database (since version 1.3)

  • Keep track of the more relevant entries using custom-set tags (since version 1.4)

bibmanager also simplifies many other BibTeX-related tasks:

  • Add or modify entries into the bibmanager database:

    • Merging user’s .bib files

    • Manually adding or editing entries

    • Add entries from ADS bibcodes

  • entry adding via your default text editor

  • Query entries in the bibmanager database by author, year, or title keywords

  • Generate .bib files built from your .tex files

  • Compile LaTeX projects with the latex or pdflatex directives

  • Perform queries into ADS and add entries by bibcode

  • Fetch PDF files from ADS (via their bibcode, new since version 1.2)

Be Kind

If bibmanager was useful for your research, please consider acknowledging the effort of the developers of this project. Here’s a BibTeX entry for that:

@MISC{Cubillos2020zndoBibmanager,
       author = {{Cubillos}, Patricio E.},
        title = "{bibmanager: A BibTeX manager for LaTeX projects, Zenodo, doi 10.5281/zenodo.2547042}",
         year = 2020,
        month = feb,
 howpublished = {Zenodo},
          eid = {10.5281/zenodo.2547042},
          doi = {10.5281/zenodo.2547042},
    publisher = {Zenodo},
       url    = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2547042},
       adsurl = {https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2020zndo...2547042C},
      adsnote = {Provided by the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System},
}

Note

Did you know that Aaron David Schneider built this totally amazing bibmanager graphic interface?

This extension lets you quickly browse through your database, retrieve metadata (title, date, tags), open in ADS or PDF (download if needed), or just copy things to the clipboard. I’ve tried it and I can only recommend to checking it out!

This is implemented via Raycast, which is available for Mac OS X users. To install Raycast and bibmanager extension check these simple instructions.

_images/raycast_bibmanager_screenshot.png

Check out this video tutorial to get started with bibmanager:

And this one covering some other features:

Contributors

bibmanager was created and is maintained by Patricio Cubillos (pcubillos[at]fulbrightmail.org).

Thanks to

These people have directly contributed to make the software better:

Documentation