Generate a Bibtex File from Package Citations

Generates a Bibtex file from a list of packages or all the installed packages. It is useful for adding relevant citations in Sweave documents.

write.pkgbib(
  entry = NULL,
  file = "Rpackages.bib",
  prefix = "",
  append = FALSE,
  verbose = TRUE
)

Arguments

entry	a `bibentry` object or a character vector of package names. If `NULL`, then the list of all installed packages is used.
file	output Bibtex file. It can be specified as a filename (as a single character string), NULL for `stdout`, or a `link{connection}` object. If `file` is a character string, an extension '.bib' is appended if not already present.
prefix	character string to prepend to the generated packages' Bibtex key.
append	a logical that indicates that the Bibtex entries should be added to the file. If `FALSE` (default), the file is overwritten.
verbose	a logical to toggle verbosity. If `file=NULL`, verbosity is forced off.

Value

the list of Bibtex objects -- invisibly.

Details

Multiple citations are handled by adding a numeric suffix to the Bibtex key (other than the first/main citation) as "<pkgname>%i" (e.g. pkg, pkg2, pkg3).

Note

The Old version of this function write.bib has now been integrated by Romain Francois in the bibtex package.

References

Creating bibtex file of all installed packages? Achim Zeileis. R-help mailing list. https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/2009-December/415181.html

Author

Renaud Gaujoux, based on the function Rpackages.bib from Achim Zeileis (see References).

Examples


write.pkgbib(c('rbibutils', 'utils', 'tools'), file='references')
#> Converted 3 of 3 package citations to BibTeX
#> Writing 3 Bibtex entries ... 
#> OK
#> Results written to file 'references.bib'
bibs <- rbibutils::readBib('references.bib', "UTF-8")
#> 
#> count_type:
#> 
#>  no_type not_char   Manual 
#>        0        0        3 
#> 
#> 
write.pkgbib(bibs, 'references2.bib')
#> Writing 3 Bibtex entries ... 
#> OK
#> Results written to file 'references2.bib'
bibs2 <- rbibutils::readBib('references.bib', "UTF-8")
#> 
#> count_type:
#> 
#>  no_type not_char   Manual 
#>        0        0        3 
#> 
#> 
identical(bibs, bibs2)
#> [1] TRUE
 stopifnot(identical(bibs, bibs2)) 

# write to stdout()
write.pkgbib(c('rbibutils', 'utils', 'tools'), file=NULL)
#> @Manual{rbibutils,
#>   title = {rbibutils: Convert Between Bibliography Formats},
#>   author = {Georgi N. Boshnakov and Chris Putman},
#>   year = {2020},
#>   note = {R package version 1.3},
#>   url = {https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=rbibutils},
#> }
#> 
#> @Manual{utils,
#>   title = {R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing},
#>   author = {{R Core Team}},
#>   organization = {R Foundation for Statistical Computing},
#>   address = {Vienna, Austria},
#>   year = {2020},
#>   url = {https://www.R-project.org/},
#> }
#> 
#> @Manual{tools,
#>   title = {R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing},
#>   author = {{R Core Team}},
#>   organization = {R Foundation for Statistical Computing},
#>   address = {Vienna, Austria},
#>   year = {2020},
#>   url = {https://www.R-project.org/},
#> }

# clean up 
unlink(c('references.bib', 'references2.bib'))