Tips for Handling Bibliographies in Org mode and LyX
A lot of trouble over a few books
Table of Contents
Figure 1: Borrowed Gravitas
For clarification of terms that are used in bibliographic and referencing discussions I found that this page and the links from it were very useful.
This page is designed for anyone who needs some quick tips on how to use bibliographic data in Org-mode and LyX. Org-mode has the mighty Org-ref which has the potential to handle all the tasks you might have for formatting bibliographic data. It's a worthy addition to your academic workflow and deserves a page to itself in order to describe its many features. It has a moderately steep learning curve and it is probably helpful to have at least a passing knowledge of raw Latex commands in order to get the most out of it. The documentation is excellent but it assumes good skills in Emacs , working with Org files and Latex. It probably needs a few more "how to" simple tutorials to help you climb that learning curve.
Org-ref easy start
With an empty file called something similar to yourbib.bib all ready existing, then the following will work. Decide where you want to place your bibliography, M-x org ref and write
bibliography:yourbib.bib
This video by John Kitchin, the writer of Org-ref will get you started
A .bib file is defined here as a text file that contains some bibliographic data in bibtex format.
- With org -ref installed its very easy to get bibtex information .
- With material that has a DOI its possible to drop the item directly into the Emacs window to retrieve the reference.
- With material that has an ISBN number ie. a book M-x ISBN-to-biblex will write bibtex information directly to the yourbib.bib file
Org-ref is a huge and wonderful package but is beyond the scope of this page.
LyX
The beauty of LyX is that it does a fantastic job of taming Latex. It's by far the best Latex document handler available. In addition it has great integration with bibliographic management tools like Zotero and Jabber.
LyX handles bibliographic records very well . It works best for science or social science bibliographies but with a few easy hacks its simple to get it working for Arts subjects. The recommended package for humanities citations is Natbib. In the link below there is some discussion on whether jurabib can also be a good choice . Current versions of LyX include the more advanced biblatex. There are a number of important choices that can be made about whether to use jurabib citation style or the more up to date biblatex package and there are arguments both for and against using them. This page from the LyX wiki summarises the arguments. And this page has a very helpful and extremely useful summary of why biblatex is the future.
The citation command works well with LyX but by default it only produces a list of references cited and lists titles in "References" . To produce a full Biography which references all the items you consulted then you need to do two things. First under Document-Preferences-Bibliography it is necessary to choose the Natbib citation style as well as the author-year option. To insert your bibliography use the insert-TOC-Bibliography from the drop down menus within LyX. Then you can rename it from the default "References" by inserting the following TeX code just before where you want the Bibliography to go.
\renewcommand\bibname{ Bibliography}
And then with the cursor next to the red box, insert your bibliography.
If this doesn't work with the Natbib style then try this:
\renewcommand{\refname}{yourtitlehere}
If you want your citations to be in () brackets rather than []. Then the LyX Wiki page cited above suggests to put:
\bibpunct{(}{)}{,}{a}{,}{,}
In the Latex pre-amble. It worked on my version of LyX.
I found a very interesting discussion on the use of Org-ref , emacs and bibliographies on reddit. It mentions the names sci-hub and libgen , so if you disaprove of them then don't read this page.