Straightforward Bibliography Management in R with the RefManageR Package

TL;DR

The RefManageR package for R simplifies bibliographic reference management by supporting BibLaTeX, enabling importing, editing, and citing references with advanced features and integrations for RMarkdown and RHTML documents.

Contribution

It introduces comprehensive support for BibLaTeX in R, including importing, exporting, and citation functionalities, enhancing bibliographic workflows in R.

Findings

Supports full BibLaTeX functionality in R

Enables importing and converting .bib files between BibTeX and BibLaTeX

Provides tools for searching, updating, and exporting references

Abstract

This work introduces the R package RefManageR, which provides tools for importing and working with bibliographic references. It extends the bibentry class in R in a number of useful ways, including providing R with previously unavailable support for BibLaTeX. BibLaTeX provides a superset of the functionality of BibTeX, including full Unicode support, no memory limitations, additional fields and entry types, and more sophisticated sorting of references. RefManageR provides functions for citing and generating a bibliography with hyperlinks for documents prepared with RMarkdown or RHTML. Existing .bib files can be read into R and converted from BibTeX to BibLaTeX and vice versa. References can also be imported via queries to NCBI's Entrez, Zotero libraries, Google Scholar, and CrossRef. Additionally, references can be created by reading PDFs stored on the user's machine with the help of Poppler. Entries stored in the reference manager can be easily searched by any field, by date ranges, and by various formats for name lists (author by last names, translator by full names, etc.). Entries can also be updated, combined, sorted, printed in a number of styles, and exported.