Manipulating BibTeX files

Some time we all had that moment of cleaning exported BibTeX files from the archive. For me cleaning up an specific element is an important which makes my bibliography more clean and readable. BibTool is a tool that can be used to modify the file.

For example the other day I was trying to remove the “Abstract” element from the entire file of Bibliography which itself was about 2500 sources to modify. To use the BibTool for removing particular field, the first step is to create a source file. I would name it “remove-abstract.rsc” and include the line:

delete.field = { Abstract }

It is possible to add as many elements as you want to the file. The next step is to invoke the created file into your bib file, let’s call it “original.bib” as:

bibtool -r remove-abstract.rsc original.bib -o modified.bib

Hope this helps!