steeliron550-ui

steeliron550-ui / search-bibtex

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A command-line tool for quickly scraping BibTeX information from computer science conferences and journals, optimized for Agents.

36
3
89% credibility
Found May 30, 2026 at 70 stars -- GitGems finds repos before they trend. Get early access to the next one.
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AI Analysis
TypeScript
AI Summary

search-bibtex is a command-line tool that helps researchers and academics convert PDF papers into properly formatted BibTeX citations. You feed it a PDF, it extracts the metadata, searches multiple academic databases simultaneously, ranks the results by relevance, and lets you choose or automatically select the best match to generate a citation entry.

How It Works

1
📄 You have a PDF paper

You drop a PDF of an academic paper into the tool and it immediately reads the first few pages to find the title, authors, and year.

2
🔍 The tool searches multiple sources at once

Behind the scenes, it simultaneously checks DBLP, arXiv, Crossref, OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar, and DOI databases to find matching papers.

3
🏆 Results are ranked by relevance

The tool scores each candidate based on how well the title, authors, year, and identifiers match your paper, then shows you the best matches first.

4
You choose how to pick a result
⌨️
Interactive selection

Use j/k keys to browse, / to filter, and Enter to confirm your choice in a Vim-style selector.

🔢
Automatic selection

Pass a number like --select-index 0 to let a script automatically pick the first (best) result.

📚 You get a complete BibTeX entry

The tool returns a properly formatted BibTeX citation that you can paste directly into your reference library, with the original citation key preserved if you're updating an existing file.

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AI-Generated Review

What is search-bibtex?

search-bibtex is a command-line tool that turns paper PDFs into BibTeX entries. Drop in a PDF, and it extracts the title, authors, and identifiers, then queries academic databases like DBLP, arXiv, Crossref, and Semantic Scholar to find matching citations. The tool ranks candidates by configurable source priority and field similarity, then lets you pick one interactively or pipe the result into your workflow. It also refreshes existing BibTeX files, keeping your citation keys intact while pulling fresh metadata. Built in TypeScript, ships as standalone binaries for macOS, Linux, and Windows.

Why is it gaining traction?

Researchers and developers waste hours manually hunting down citations. This tool automates the tedious part: extract title from PDF, search multiple sources in parallel, rank the best match. The interactive selector with Vim-style keybindings is a nice touch for terminal-heavy workflows. The TOML configuration is flexible enough for power users who want to weight sources differently. Being agent-optimized signals it's designed for AI-assisted research pipelines, not just human use.

Who should use this?

Academic researchers drowning in unorganized PDFs. ML engineers writing literature reviews or tracking paper citations. Developers building tools that ingest academic literature. Anyone maintaining large BibTeX files who wants to batch-update stale entries. Not for beginners who just need one citation occasionally.

Verdict

A focused, well-architected tool that solves a real pain point for the academic developer workflow. At 36 stars and 0.9% credibility score, it's early-stage but the documentation is thorough and the feature set is complete. Worth trying if you work with academic papers regularly, but treat it as production-ready for personal use while the community grows.

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