The goal of this project is to provide an easy-to-use tool that autogenerates a bibliography. Specifically, the code provides a decorator that allows you to add citations to your functions. Then, if one of the decorated functions is called, their relevant citation keys are added to a dictionary together with the function signature that generated those citation keys. Once the program is finished running, you can request a list of used citation keys to see which cites you used where. Also, you can export the bibliography as a bibtex file containing only the references that are used at least once.

The library is available on PyPI, so you can install it with pip:

pip install bibdec

Below is a minimal example demonstrating with only one key. However, you can also decorate a function with multiple keys, or even have conditional citations based on the function signature. More complex examples are available in the example section of the documentation.

from bibdec import Bibliography

bibtex = """
@article{key1,
author = {Some Author},
title = {Some paper},
journal = {Some Journal},
year = {1999},
volume = {42},
number = {100 -- 150}
}
"""
bibliography = Bibliography(bibtex)

@bibliography.register_cites("key1")
def f(a):
    return a + 2

print("Before calling the function:")
print(bibliography.citations)
print(bibliography.active_bibliography)

f(0)
print("After calling the function:")
print(bibliography.citations)
print(bibliography.active_bibliography)

Before calling the function:
{}

After calling the function:
{'__main__.f()': {'key1'}}
@article{key1,
author = {Some Author},
journal = {Some Journal},
number = {100 -- 150},
title = {Some paper},
volume = {42},
year = {1999}
}