Bibclean processes BibTeX bibliographies to remove/strip unwanted entries, and abbreviate long journal names. I wrote this utility because my reference manager (Mendeley) includes a lot of extra information in exported BibTeX files, and because I find bibliographies using "P Roy Soc A–Math Phy" much more readable than "Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical and Physical Sciences". Long journal names can quickly bloat any bibliography.

A virtualenv is recommended. I've dropped support for legacy Python, so Python 3.4+ only.

python setup.py install

This will install two executables: bibclean and bibextra.

bibclean provides the main functionality.

If the exact full journal name wasn't found in the abbreviations database, bibclean can perform a fuzzy search and report the top five matches. By default, fuzzy search is disabled, because it is very time intensive.

bibextra contains the following utility functions:

• dump: scrape all the journal abbreviations from the Web of Knowledge site. PLEASE do not run this without reason. The included database already contains all the abbreviations already.

• query: query the journal abbreviations database. By default, this will perform a fuzzy search if the exact journal name wasn't found.

• write_config: writes a copy of the default configuration to the default user configuration directory (the exact path is printed on success).

The precedent of settings is default < user < command-line.