============================================ pm2bib: import PubMed references into BibTeX

:Author: Tamás Nepusz :Email: [email protected]

This is a simple Python module that can import references into a BibTeX bibliography based on PubMed IDs. It is based on pyP2B_, the excellent work of Jean-Etienne Poirrier (see his contact info on his webpage). I did some refactoring, implemented the escaping of capital letters in the Title field, removed the GUI parts and added support for non-numeric values in the Number field.

.. _pyP2B: http://www.poirrier.be/~jean-etienne/software/pyp2b/

Usage

Command-line usage is dead simple. Assuming that you have put the script somewhere in your path (and you are not using Windows), you can run the script as follows::

$ pm2bib 20214776

This will output a nicely formatted BibTeX snippet for the paper with PubMed ID 20214776. If you have your bibliography in a file called biblio.bib, you can simply append the output of pm2bib directly::

$ pm2bib 20214776 >>biblio.bib

Alternatively, if you are using vim (like I do) and you quickly want to import a paper into your bibliography, open up biblio.bib in vim and type :r! pm2bib 20214776 to insert the output of pm2bib directly into the current buffer.

Command line options

The following command line options are supported:

-j FORMAT, --journal-title FORMAT specifies the format of the journal title. Currently the following formats are supported:

- ``full``: the full journal title (e.g., *Biochemical Society
  Transactions*)
- ``abbrev``: the abbreviated journal title (e.g., *BIochem Soc
  Trans*)
- ``iso``: the ISO journal title (e.g., *Biochem. Soc. Trans.*)

Bugs

Nothing is perfect. If you happen to find a bug in pm2bib, send me a message to the email address above.