BibTeX Manager

The BibTeX Manager is a helpful extension for Visual Studio Code that streamlines the process of fetching and managing BibTeX references for research papers and websites. It simplifies the retrieval of BibTeX entries, allowing you to effortlessly generate citations with just a few clicks.

Features

Fetching Paper-BibTeX

With release 1.0 we improved the usability by adding a visual interface for the BibTeX manager.

1. Copy the title of any research paper to your clipboard.
2. Click "Add Citation" in the status bar, or click the "BibTeX Manager" icon in the activity bar and paste your title manually.
3. Pick the matching paper from the results.

The status-bar "Add Citation" action opens the BibTeX Manager view automatically if it isn't open yet.

Generating BibTeX for websites

Version 1.0 does not support generating BibTeX for websites yet. We removed the feature from the pre-release since it was incomplete.

Customizable File Path

By default, the fetched BibTeX entries are saved to a file named library.bib. Set bibtexManager.libraryFilePath to override the location and filename. The path is workspace-relative; absolute paths are also accepted. The .bib extension is appended if you leave it off.

Use workspace settings if you maintain several projects with different libraries.

Customizable BibTeX key

Set bibtexManager.bibKey.usePattern to true and choose a pattern via bibtexManager.bibKey.pattern to control how citation keys are generated. Otherwise the upstream key from Semantic Scholar is used.

Semantic Scholar API key (recommended)

Searches go through the Semantic Scholar Graph API. Without a key, requests share a single global rate-limit pool with every other unauthenticated caller, which is frequently saturated and returns 429 Too Many Requests. The extension already retries with backoff, but heavy usage will still fail intermittently.

To avoid this, request a free personal API key from Semantic Scholar and paste it into the extension settings:

1. Apply at semanticscholar.org/product/api#api-key. The key is emailed to you after approval (turnaround is at Semantic Scholar's discretion — usually days).
2. In VS Code, open Settings and search for bibtexManager.semanticScholar.apiKey.
3. Paste the key. It will be sent as the x-api-key header on every request.

The key is stored in your VS Code settings on your machine only — keep it private and do not share it.

Development

• npm install
• npm run compile — production bundles (extension + webview)
• npm run watch — webpack watch mode
• npm run test:unit — pure-module unit tests (mocha)
• npm test — full VS Code integration tests
• Press F5 in VS Code to launch an Extension Development Host.

Support

If you like the work done here, please give it a star on GitHub or in the extension store ⭐