Summary

A tool to create a BibTeX entry for online articles or blogs.

Generate BibTeX from URL

This is a follow-up on 6 “Episode”” in previous posts titled “Do yourself a favor: learn Markdown…”

In a previous article (Sgro (2022)) I presented how to add bibliographical information within an Rmarkdown document (Allaire et al. (2023)) with the BibTex format in order to include books, but mostly published articles with a PubMed entry.

This short post is to provide a tool to ease the creation of a BibTex entry for online articles, blogs, etc. using the free tool. “Generate BibTeX from URL” (Dzialowski (2023)) that I have just used for the dplyr posts (Sgro (2023a) and Sgro (2023b).)

Here is a simple example: creating a BibTeX entry for the Faculty page of the Biochemistry Department:

1. Go to the web site: www.getbibtex.com/
2. Enter the web address in the text box.
3. Press the “Get BibTeX” button.

The results will appear below in the BibTeX format that can be copied.

We can now make some minor adjustments by hand now that the information is in the correct format. I typically do the following:

1. Edit the title (within to @misc{}) as it is derived from the TITLE entry of the web page.
2. Fill-in author and year often left blank.

The edited is done on the complete entry which has been pasted as text into a local file which I usually call online.bib.

To use the reference within the Rmarkdown text we add @ before the title. So for this particular page it would be cited with @wiscFaculty and result in this text citation within the text: “Faculty — Biochem.wisc.edu” (2023) and then referenced at the bottom of the page.

The author of this useful script has made the source code available on GitHub (Dzialowski (2023).) As a further example here are the 2 entries I created with this tool for the tool itself and the github code pages. These were generated automatically, I just edited the title and the year as detailed abov.

@misc{Karlosos_getbibtex_2023,
    author = {Karol Dzialowski},
    title = {{U}{R}{L} to {B}ib{T}e{X} generator - get {B}ib{T}e{X} for any website},
    howpublished = {\url{https://www.getbibtex.com/}},
    year = {2023},
    note = {[Accessed 26-12-2023]},
}

@misc{Karlosos_github_2023,
    author = {{K}arlosos {K}arol {D}ziałowski},
    title = {{G}it{H}ub - karlosos/getbibtex: {B}ib{T}e{X} entry generator},
    howpublished = {\url{https://github.com/karlosos/getbibtex}},
    year = {2023},
    note = {[Accessed 26-12-2023]},
}