Org-bibtex: Annotated bibliography with orgmode

Org-bibtex is responsible for handling bibtex citation in orgmode. In contrib library there is an addition (org-bibtex-extras.el) by Eric Schulte. This can be used as an easy way to manage an annotated bibliography in orgmode. You can find a video demo to make the setup here.

In your init file you should add the following chunk.

;; load contrib library
(add-to-list 'load-path
             (expand-file-name "/path/to/org-mode/contrib/lisp"
                              (file-name-directory
                               org-find-library-dir "org")))

;; manage citations
(require 'org-bibtex)

;; export citations
(require 'ox-bibtex)
(setq org-bibtex-file "papers.org")

There are three basic commands:

  • M-x org-bibtex to export the citations in a bibtex file
  • M-x org-bibtex-yank to import a citation from bibtex text (clipboard)
  • M-x org-bibtex-check-all to check the validity of the entries

Note that below each heading you can keep your annotations.

* The Org Mode 7 Reference Manual-Organize your life with GNU Emacs
  :PROPERTIES:
  :TITLE:    The Org Mode 7 Reference Manual-Organize your life with GNU Emacs                  :manual:
  :BTYPE:    book
  :CUSTOM_ID: dominik2010org
  :AUTHOR:   Dominik, Carsten
  :YEAR:     2010
  :PUBLISHER: Network Theory Ltd.
  :END:
This line is my annotation for the entry of Org Mode 7 Reference Manual.
* A multi-language computing environment for literate programming and reproducible research    :babel:
  :PROPERTIES:
  :BTYPE: article
  :AUTHOR: Eric Schulte and Dan Davidson and Tom Dye and Carsten Dominik
  :JOURNAL: Journal of Statistical Software
  :VOLUME: 46
  :NUMBER: 3
  :YEAR:     2012
  :MONTH: January
  :CUSTOM_ID: schulte2012babel
  :END:
Some annotation about babel.
NOTE
In the beginning of the video by Eric Schulte you can see that he evaluates the buffer of org-bibtex.el. If you do not do that you will not be able to yank citations. My routine is that I export and open my bibtex document in a new buffer before yanking a new entry.

Advanced search in orgmode

Using tags and properties we can perform advanced searching for keywords in our entries. We can also use tags in our bibliographic headings, without affecting the export to *.bib file. We can add our bibliography in the front of the agenda (C-c [) and we can use C-c a m to search for tags and properties.

If we would like to begin our search based on a property, we have to set the key name followed by the value. Some examples for properties using C-c a m:

YEAR>="2012"
Search for entries after 2011
AUTHOR={Dominik\|Schulte}
Search entries which contain in the author field either Dominik or Schulte
AUTHOR={Dominik}+babel
This will match the entries with Author=Dominik and Tags=babel

Note that double quotes will match the exact key value, whereas curly brackets will perform partial matches.

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