Published on 21 October 2025
I keep a list of all of my publications in a few places - on my CV, on ORCID, on Google Scholar, and on this site. When I have the opportunity to include a bib file in those lists, I try to. In order to do that, I keep a folder of all of my bib files. I use LaTeX, I find bibtex a useful format for storing citations, and I want to make it easier for everyone else to cite my publications.
I’ve been using cat to automatically make a giant list of all of the bibfiles for a while. But this wasn’t really great. What I wanted was a script that formatted all of the entries, and which checked the DOIs.
A few months ago I used an LLM to automatically generate a Python script to check DOIs and to concatenate the files easily. That worked well. Today, I extended it to check multiple DOI registries (not all DOIs are registered everywhere) for validation, and to use bibtex-tidy to automatically format each of the entries. I’m happy with the result; each individual file is more readable now. For example, this file:
@article{Littauer2025ZootaxaPycnocraspedum,
author = {Richard Littauer},
year = {2025},
title = {
On the correct spelling of \textit{{Pycnocraspedum} rowleyense} {Schwarzhans, Psomadakis \&
Nielsen}, 2025 ({Ophidiidae})
},
journal = {Zootaxa},
volume = {5692},
number = {1},
pages = {200--200},
doi = {10.11646/zootaxa.5692.1.12},
url = {https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.5692.1.12}
}
It just looks better.
That script is here. I hope its useful to someone else.
How do you keep your publications in order? Do you?