It’s always been a painfull task, trying to fill in all the bibtex-fields when adding a new source to your LaTeX-document. www.CiteULike.org simplifies this by allowing you to search the scientific publications in its database and exporting as bibtex.
That search engine can be a real time saver when trying to find your sources in BibTex-format. They also offer registred members a library of their own which they can export very easily. This has changed the way I work when writing reports. As soon as I want to cite some paper, a quick search for it on CiteULike adds it to my library. The entire library can then be exported as a bibtex-document which is perfect. What is not so good is that they add a lot of extra information.
But, that’s why I have a python-script which downloads my current library, filters out unwanted fields in the bibtex-file and saves as a file. For each LaTeX-document I write, I always point the bibliography to the same file and voilá.
updateReferences.py (Adjust the three variables in the beginning to your environment and needs).
The next step would be to automatically call this updateReferences-script when bibtex is run…
