Fixing Bibtex Files Made by Mendeley

Mendeley is a popular citation manager but it doesn’t properly export bibtex files. Bibtex files (with a .bib extension) are used to add your references to papers compiled in LaTeX. You can find many reports of these problems, including the Mendeley support page. Some of these problems haven’t been officially fixed for over 6 years! In this post I will share some code that addresses these problems, including:

Constraints on what you can write in the “year” field
Extra curly braces around titles
Incorrect format of “month”
Ability to select what types of entries include the URL (instead of only webpages)

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How to Cite Yourself

In my last post, I offered some guidelines on choosing citations. The very first guideline was to avoid conflicts of interest, which generally refers to citing yourself (but also applies to your close collaborators). Now, I’m going to describe how to cite yourself. I’m not changing my mind on this topic, but I believe that there are scenarios when self-citations are justified. Here, I’m going to list when it’s ok to cite yourself and how you should do it. Continue reading “How to Cite Yourself” →

How to Choose Citations

Choosing papers to cite is a key step in preparing a manuscript, but you shouldn’t take it lightly. Consider that a highly cited paper is often assumed to be a great paper. I don’t believe that this should be automatic, but I recognize the value of this (relatively) objective metric for judging someone’s work. With this in mind, this post offers some general tips on how to choose citations.

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