In mathematically inclined research fields, people use Latex to write scientific documents. Proper references (with hyperlinks) are of great importance and convenience in today's digital publishing environment. A lot of reference managers exist for this purpose, but maintaining large bibtex files remains a time-consuming task and is almost impossible to do in a consistent way. Moreover, this work is replicated over and over again by individual researchers or research groups.
Objectives
Creating the perfect bibtex database (for articles in a certain research domain, such as quantum cryptography) which is publicly accessible (e.g. hosted on github).
Making it easy to use and extend this database.
If successful, I expect the outcomes of this project to be useful to hundreds of researchers.
Approach
First, the student needs to reach a proper understanding of the current situation and the desired objectives. This is accomplished by looking into the inner workings of bibtex, and testing the functionality of other reference managers.
In a second step, we will develop an automated way of creating the "perfect bibfile".
We will be building upon an already existing open-source Python Bibtex Parser. We will aim at implementing various extensions of this parser:
create alphastyle citation keys
look up article information from crossref, dblp, arXiv, extract the relevant information from these sources
provide various bibtex file formats
In a last step (if time allows), we will create a website where users can add new articles to the (hosted version) of the perfect bibfile. As this process is fully automated, users can upload their whole old bibfiles, and non-existing articles will automatically be added to the "perfect database" and the users instructed about what to change in their source to be able to work with the new bibfile.
Prerequisites
some previous programming experience in Python
Expected Learning Outcomes and Skills Acquired
At the end of this project, you will have learned quite a lot of new skills such as: