RefMan

RefMan - A Simple python-based reference manager

Demo

How RefMan works

RefMan capitalises on Sci-hub and crossref to provide a very simple Python-based reference manager.

The goal of RefMan is to prioritise getting bibliographic data and PDFs, wihtout having to worry about databases or manually downloading and maintaining references yourself.

RefMan maintains:

1. a BibTeX bibliography file ref.bib, and
2. a directory of pdf's in a REFMAN_DATA.

RefMan's output is stored in refman_data in the current working directory, or sourced from a path listed under the REFMAN_DATA environment variable.

How to use RefMan

Adding new papers to refman_data can be achieved in three ways:

1. With a DOI, using -d, --doi, or
2. With an arxiv reference using -a, --arxiv, or
3. As a last-resort, with a BibTeX string using -b, --bibtex, alongside an optional PDF (url or local-path) using -p, --pdf.

Installing

With pip:

python3 -m pip install refman

Or manually:

git clone https://https://github.com/adriancaruana/refman
cd refman
./install

Getting Started

# Make a directory to store references
mkdir ~/refman_data

# Set the REFMAN_DATA environment variable. Add this to your `.bashrc` for persistence.
export REFMAN_DATA=$HOME/refman_data

# Add a paper using a DOI:
refman doi 10.1103/PHYSREVLETT.116.061102

# Add a paper using an `arxiv` reference
refman arxiv 2103.16574

# Add a paper using a bibtex string & pdf.
refman bibtex "@inproceedings{devlin2018bert,
	title="BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding",
	author="Jacob {Devlin} and Ming-Wei {Chang} and Kenton {Lee} and Kristina N. {Toutanova}",
	booktitle="Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)",
	pages="4171--4186",
	year="2018"
}" -p "https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/N19-1423.pdf"

Usage

~ >>> refman --help
Usage: refman [OPTIONS] COMMAND [ARGS]...

  RefMan - A Simple python-based reference manager.

Options:
  --install-completion [bash|zsh|fish|powershell|pwsh]
                                  Install completion for the specified shell.
  --show-completion [bash|zsh|fish|powershell|pwsh]
                                  Show completion for the specified shell, to
                                  copy it or customize the installation.

  --help                          Show this message and exit.

Commands:
  arxiv   Gets the paper from an Arxiv reference string
  bibtex  Adds an entry to the database from a bibtex-string.
  doi     Tries to find and download the paper using the DOI.
  rekey   Modify the key of a paper.
  rm      Removes a paper from the disk and database.