Sources for BibTeX entries

Question

Does anyone know of a good place to find already-done BibTeX entries for standard books in advanced math? Or is this impossible because the citation should include items specific to your copy? (I am seeing the latter as potentially problematic because the only date I can find in my copy of Hartshorne is 2006, whereas the citations I can find all put the publication date at 1977.)

The 1977 is on the copyright page. Is that really different in your copy? (The only reason I know of to change it would be a new, revised edition. I'm not aware of a second edition of Hartshorne, but I may be out of date.) — Henry Cohn, May 07 '12 at 16:17

score 49 · Answer 1 · edited Dec 16 '22 at 14:17

About 10 years ago I wrote a perl script called "bibweb" which uses MathSciNet to produce bibtex entries for references. If you have access to MathSciNet and you run

bibweb -c 'hartshorne;algebraic-geometry'

then one of its answers is

@book {MR0463157,
    AUTHOR = {Hartshorne, Robin},
     TITLE = {Algebraic geometry},
      NOTE = {Graduate Texts in Mathematics, No. 52},
 PUBLISHER = {Springer-Verlag},
   ADDRESS = {New York},
      YEAR = {1977},
     PAGES = {xvi+496},
      ISBN = {0-387-90244-9},
   MRCLASS = {14-01},
  MRNUMBER = {MR0463157 (57 \#3116)},
MRREVIEWER = {Robert Speiser},
}

It's not perfect, but it works for me. Download it at https://github.com/jhpalmieri/bibweb. It's free, so satisfaction guaranteed or double your money back.

Seems that the link is broken... – Bach May 16 '16 at 10:38 — Bach, May 16 '16 at 10:38

score 42 · Accepted Answer · edited Dec 16 '22 at 09:47

42

I recommend using the AMS website MREF, located here.

EDIT : Another remark about your question. Don't worry too much about getting things like the printing date for a book correct (it changes every time they make a new printing run). Just make sure that you have the author, title, and edition in some standard format (and for papers, the journal, date, and page number). Every journal will reformat things into their house style and verify that your bibliographic entries are correct. Make those copy-editors work for their money!

edited Dec 16 '22 at 09:47

Christian Nassau

1,554

answered Apr 06 '10 at 21:44

Andy Putman

43,430

15

MathSciNet can also be told to give the BibTeX entry. Both also give amsrefs entry (which I tend to prefer immensely...) – Mariano Suárez-Álvarez Apr 06 '10 at 21:47
2

My favorite part of mref is that it produces bibliographic entries formatted in tex. I've never much cared for bibtex -- I prefer just to write out my bibliography by hand. Mref makes it easy. – Andy Putman Apr 06 '10 at 21:52
Mref asks me to make it unique which I cannot achieve – მამუკა ჯიბლაძე Mar 23 '21 at 09:13
2

@AndyPutman: As someone who worked as a typesetter, *please* use bibtex. There's nothing worse than seeing a paper with some 50 references, or more, all formatted by hand, not according to the journal's standard, realising that you need to go at them, one by one and fish them out of mathscinet, or worse. – Asaf Karagila Dec 16 '22 at 16:41
@AsafKaragila: I barely have enough time to write my papers as it is, so there is a very high bar for changing my paper writing workflow. I just don't see the benefit to me personally for learning a new bibliographic system given that I can use the one I use so seamlessly. – Andy Putman Dec 16 '22 at 17:53
2

@AndyPutman: If you don't see how copy-paste into a .bib file, and then just using something like \bibliographystyle{alpha} saves time, then I guess we're at an impasse. – Asaf Karagila Dec 16 '22 at 18:09
@AsafKaragila: So I think that one issue for me is that I write all my papers in a terminal using vi, and have been doing this for 20+ years now (so am unlikely to ever change). It's a pain to toggle back and forth between different files, so I greatly prefer to have everything in one file (you might point out that I have to toggle between different parts of the file, but I have a system for writing my files that makes this easy. It's the whole "workflow" thing I alluded to earlier.) – Andy Putman Dec 16 '22 at 19:11

score 30 · Answer 3 · answered Apr 06 '10 at 23:51

30

Google Scholar will produce BibTeX entries if you turn on Show links to import to BibTeX in Scholar search preferences.

answered Apr 06 '10 at 23:51

Mikael Vejdemo-Johansson

2,517

3

Thanks for this tip! I did not know that. The BibTeX they generate is not always very high quality, but it looks useful as a starting point. – David Eppstein Apr 07 '10 at 17:00
That is awesome. – Dirk Apr 15 '12 at 08:43
1

Many of the scholar bibtex entries are of very low quality, in the sense that they provide incomplete information (say, no journal, or no pages) – მამუკა ჯიბლაძე Mar 23 '21 at 09:15

score 26 · Answer 4 · edited Dec 16 '22 at 09:48

26

MR Lookup is also a good tool and seems to be free.

edited Dec 16 '22 at 09:48

Christian Nassau

1,554

answered Apr 07 '10 at 01:16

lhf

2,942

4

It's not completely free, just partly unrestricted... it gives you the first 3 items of any request. In addition, Boolean "and" seems not to work in author field. AMS wants your money... – YCor Feb 03 '18 at 00:43

score 19 · Answer 5 · answered Apr 07 '10 at 02:21

19

The best thing about using MathSciNet for bibtex entries is that it is standard and universally accepted. No need to reinvent a bicycle.

answered Apr 07 '10 at 02:21

VA.

12,929

36

Its also worth pointing out that people without university access can get MathSciNet's bibtex data via http://www.ams.org/mrlookup . – David Zureick-Brown Apr 07 '10 at 06:26

score 11 · Answer 6 · edited Dec 16 '22 at 14:16

11

The Courant Centre has a useful webpage which produces nice BibTeX entries for arXiv preprints, if you input a paper ID or an author ID.

Random fact: The K-theory archive has a loooong BibTeX file on the K-theory literature available for download.

edited Dec 16 '22 at 14:16

Martin Sleziak

4,608

answered Apr 07 '10 at 13:40

Andreas Holmstrom

5,517

score 10 · Answer 7 · answered Apr 07 '10 at 11:19

Zotero is a nice plug-in for firefox that produces a database of your favorite publications. Every time you are on a website like arxiv, math-sci net or the homepage of some journal, it offers you to save the publication into your database. It gathers all the relevant information automatically from the page, and it does that amazingly well. Once you've got all your publications in your database, just hit the export to bibtex button and you're done.

score 7 · Answer 8 · edited Dec 16 '22 at 14:15

7

I prefer the Zentralblatt database because it provides bibtex entries with DOIs.

edited Dec 16 '22 at 14:15

Martin Sleziak

4,608

answered May 11 '10 at 13:32

Olivier

223

1

The same is true of AMS's MREF, mentioned earlier. – Mark Meckes May 11 '10 at 13:46
1

Also, very importantly for some, Zentralblatt is fully free, while Mathscinet is available to non-subscribers only in its crippled version MREF. – Federico Poloni Dec 16 '22 at 21:10

score 6 · Answer 9 · edited Feb 02 '18 at 19:39

6

I also use JabRef. In addition, there is an easy to use JabRef plugin for the Union Catalogue (GVK) of several German federal states participating in the so-called Common Library Network (GBV).

The GVK fetching is explained at http://help.jabref.org/en/GVK.

edited Feb 02 '18 at 19:39

koppor

101

answered May 07 '12 at 13:07

kassandra

165

score 5 · Answer 10 · edited Dec 16 '22 at 14:13

5

Another way is to use google with option "filetype:bib". Something like this.

edited Dec 16 '22 at 14:13

Martin Sleziak

4,608

answered Apr 07 '10 at 02:02

Arseniy Akopyan

1,431

score 5 · Answer 11 · edited Dec 16 '22 at 14:14

If you use a mac, BibDesk is fantastic: among other really nice features, it lets you find your book/article/etc on your choice of free sites (ACM, arXiv, CiteULike, Google Scholar, HubMed, SPIRES) or subscription sites (IEEE Xplore, MathSciNet, Project Euclid, Zentralblatt Math) and then once you've found the item, it takes one click to import the citation into the database. The database can also store electronic copies of articles (if available) referenced to the citation.

So for example, I would open BibDesk, click on the icon that says Web, click on "MathSciNet". Within the program I see the MathSciNet page (assuming I'm at work where I have access). Type in the search terms Hartshorne and Geometry, and up comes 8 citations I could import. One of them is Algebraic Geometry from 1977, so I would click on the button that says "import". BibDesk does all the other work.

While writing a paper, just drag and drop the citations onto your LaTeX document to embed \cite{blah} with the appropriate cite key (at least if you're using TeXShop).

When you're ready to stick a bibliography into your paper, select the relevant articles in the BibDesk database and export them into a BibTeX file. It's super easy.

score 5 · Answer 12 · edited Dec 16 '22 at 14:14

5

Since it's not been mentioned, I'll chime in with Mendeley, which provides BibTeX citations for papers on the site (minus the linebreaks, unfortunately). They also have a freeware reference manager.

edited Dec 16 '22 at 14:14

Martin Sleziak

4,608

answered May 07 '12 at 16:47

Emilio Pisanty

2,308

score 4 · Answer 13 · answered Mar 18 '15 at 02:30

Google books also gives bibtex references and at least once I found a reference there for a math book not on Mathscinet for some reason. To get the bibtex you go to the bottom of the "about this book" page and click on "Export citation: Bibtex" (you can also get Endnote and Refman references... whatever those are).

score 4 · Answer 14 · answered Apr 07 '10 at 14:31

4

Try http://www.ottobib.com/. It is a ISBN to Bibtex (or other formats) converter.

answered Apr 07 '10 at 14:31

Alejandro

101

score 4 · Answer 15 · answered Apr 28 '10 at 09:01

I wrote a script using AutoHotKey that allows me to highlight the title of a reference (e.g., in a PDF article). It then looks up Google Scholar based on that title using Google Scholar's "allintitle:" key word. I have Google Scholar set to export BibTeX. I can then easily drag and drop the BibTeX into JabRef. I posted the details on my blog: http://jeromyanglim.blogspot.com/2010/04/how-to-get-quick-access-to-full-text.html

score 4 · Answer 16 · edited Dec 16 '22 at 16:14

4

I have had problems with this earlier, and I agree with Olivier, that Zentralblatt's database is pretty good. I've even created a simple program which loads them easily to JabRef or any BibTex files. It works properly, try it out if you are interested. You can find it at https://sites.google.com/site/jabrefzentralblatt. No install or anything needed.

edited Dec 16 '22 at 16:14

LSpice

11,423

answered Apr 14 '12 at 20:53

Ambrus Weisz

1

The link is broken. – Ben McKay Mar 23 '21 at 14:19

score 3 · Answer 17 · answered Mar 18 '15 at 01:43

3

Check out http://www.bibtexsearch.com - it has several million bibtex records.

answered Mar 18 '15 at 01:43

Bryan

1

score 2 · Answer 18 · answered Apr 07 '10 at 02:51

2

There's also Lead2Amazon which can export in a variety of formats.

answered Apr 07 '10 at 02:51

Jason Polak

1,873

score 1 · Answer 19 · answered Feb 02 '18 at 21:25

1

I use doi2bib a lot - journals usually provide doi, but the bib entry (if present) is hidden or buried in some file. I rather just copy it from a field.

Same with isbn2bib, very useful for books.

answered Feb 02 '18 at 21:25

Per Alexandersson

15,598

score 1 · Answer 20 · answered Mar 23 '21 at 09:17

1

Currently I get very good quality bibtex entries at Crossref, hope it will last

answered Mar 23 '21 at 09:17

მამუკა ჯიბლაძე

17,468

Sources for BibTeX entries

20 Answers20

Linked