Static in the Ether

Following form my earlier post regarding a pre-compiled bibTeX database of all Internet RFCs, I discovered while browsing the CTAN archives that Richard Mortier wrote a awk script back in 2000 while at Cambridge Computing Lab, that does something similar. For purists who don’t trust this new fangled XML and XSLT stuff its available at:

http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/biblio/bibtex/utils/misc/rfc2bib.awk

Or other CTAN mirrors closer to you.

Something I usually ask my students to do us to draw up a frequency table of their use of references in their Theses. This is useful to see if one is over-citing particular sources, or disregarding sources that are more significant. Up until now most have gone the paper and pencil route.

Fred Otten came up with the following script using good old sed, awk and some plumbing, that draws up a nice list based on an input Lyx file.


#!/bin/sh
cat $1 | grep key\ \" |\
awk '{ print substr($2,2,length($2)-2)}' | \
sed -e s/,/\\n/g | \
awk 'BEGIN {i=0} \
{ if (temp[$1]) { temp[$1]=temp[$1]+1 } \
else { temp[$1]=1; tmp[i]=$1; i++; }; } \
END { for (j=0; j { print tmp[j] ” ” temp[tmp[j]] } }’ | sort


This gives a two column listing of the citation keys and their frequency count. This of course can be extended using further awk statements to transpose the columns, or sort by frequency, rather than citation key.

Jabref ships with a rather useful HTML export feature, which produces some rather nice output for publishing a somewhat interactive version of your .bib files online, or even as an electronic appendix to a thesis.

Mark Schenk has proviced some nice eexamples of other styles of export that one can use. Using these in conjunction with the Custom Export scripting built into Jabref, one should be able to achieve pretty much any kind of format or data manglin of references that you would require.

Roland Bless, has a rather useful resource of a set of BibTex information for all RFC documents for those working with RFC’s and needing to cite them using BibTex. Available for download is an automatically generated .bib database of all the current RFCs.

The 1.8 meg .bib file is probably a little large for general use but once can easily trim and copy entries required manually or using JabRef. Citations look like the following:

@MISC{rfc1466,
author = {E. Gerich},
title = {{Guidelines for Management of IP Address Space}},
howpublished = {RFC 1466 (Informational)},
month = may,
year = {1993},
note = {Obsoleted by RFC 2050},
number = {1466},
organisation = {Internet Engineering Task Force},
publisher = {IETF},
series = {Request for Comments},
timestamp = {2008.05.18},
url = {http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1466.txt}
}

A resource certain to save typing or multiple c & p operations. The one possible change one may want to make is to include the RFC number in the document tile such as:


title = {{RFC 1466: Guidelines for Management of IP Address Space}}


Another changes may be to use the @TechReport type as opposed to @Misc. An other alternative (although out of date) is the repository at University of Utah Maths Department.

Related to this the W3C have a web page which allows for automated generation of bibTeX citation information for their publications.