Bibtex, Bibdesk

I have a fairly labor intensive process of creating bibliography files for lyx and tex. I’d be interested in hearing if anyone on this forum uses KM to automate this process. I tried to implement the following python script to extra bibliography information directly from PDFs, but it didn’t work for me (I don’t know perl, and the instructions were not detailed enough for me to follow). I’m curious if anyone has a method that uses KM to at least partially automate the process of adding references to bibtex.

I have two workflows related to citations. They don't directly address the pdf -> citation problem, but they get most of the work done for me. The first workflow searches for a selection on Google Scholar.


The second workflow brings me from the browser back to BibDesk. It uses the "New Publication from Clipboard" command within BibDesk. In the more recent versions, this can handle citation text in various formats, URLs, pdfs, etc.

I'd love to see other workflows. I suspect people won't get that far with automating the pdf to citation workflow. The journal websites really offer the best data for importing into BibDesk. Google Scholar can provide a BibTex citation, but it misses a lot of information that I use.

Hey ak,

What Python script?

-Chris