When combining different .bib files from co-authors or from previous projects, sometimes the same article is cited using different cite-keys and will appear multiple times in the bibliography.

This package will go through your .bib file and find duplicate entries with different cite-keys and then update the .tex file by replacing the cite keys accordingly.

Example

Suppose your bibliography file bibliography.bib contains the following two entries:

@article{PhysRev.47.777,
  title = {Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?},
  author = {Einstein, A. and Podolsky, B. and Rosen, N.},
  journal = {Phys. Rev.},
  volume = {47},
  issue = {10},
  pages = {777--780},
  year = {1935},
  publisher = {American Physical Society},
  url = {https://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRev.47.777}
}

@article{Einstein1935,
  title = {Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?},
  author = {Einstein, A. and Podolsky, B. and Rosen, N.},
  journal = {Phys. Rev.},
  volume = {47},
  issue = {10},
  pages = {777--780},
  year = {1935},
  url = {https://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRev.47.777}
}

which you cite with both keys inside main.tex. This will result in the following bibliography:

[1] A. Einstein, B. Podolsky, and N. Rosen, Phys. Rev. 47, 777 (1935).

[2] A. Einstein, B. Podolsky, and N. Rosen, Phys. Rev. 47, 777 (1935).

This package can be used to automatically replace \cite{Einstein1935} with \cite{PhysRev.47.777} in your main.tex file and remove entry @article{Einstein1935 from your bibliography.bib file by running the following code:

from bibtex_duplicate_remover import ReplaceCiteKeys, RemoveDuplicatesInBibfile

ReplaceCiteKeys(bibliography.bib, main.tex)
RemoveDuplicatesInBibfile(bibliography.bib)

The package is compatible with nested keys such as \cite{Einstein1901, Einstein1935, Einstein1904} but replacing only the necessary key.

The above code can be easily extended to process multiple source files as:

from bibtex_duplicate_remover import ReplaceCiteKeys, RemoveDuplicatesInBibfile

files = ['./Chapters/Introduction.tex',
         './Chapters/Chapter01.tex',
         './Chapters/Chapter02.tex',
         './Chapters/Chapter03.tex',
         './Chapters/Chapter0A.tex',
         './Chapters/Chapter0B.tex',
         './Chapters/Chapter0C.tex',
         './Chapters/Chapter0D.tex'
        ]
for file in files:
    ReplaceCiteKeys('bibliography.bib', file)
RemoveDuplicatesInBibfile('bibliography.bib')

In case you do not want to replace the .bib and .tex files, the functions RemoveDuplicatesInBibfile and ReplaceCiteKeys accept an optional variable fileout to write to:

ReplaceCiteKeys('bibliography.bib', 'main.tex', 'main-2.tex')
RemoveDuplicatesInBibfile('bibliography.bib', 'bibliography-2.bib')

Installation

The package can be either installed as a standalone package using pip

pip install .

or one can also copy the folder bibtex_duplicate_remover to where your LaTeX project.

Technical

The way the code works is by traversing the entries inside the .bib file and collect all duplicate url = entries. One entry is kept and all \cite{...} keys are replaced accordingly.

License

bibtex_duplicate_remover is published under the MIT license.