Marrying BibSonomy and BibLaTeX

(This is a rewrite of an older blog post of mine that disappeared together with that awful WordPress page)

I manage my scientific references in BibSonomy. With a standard LaTeX+BibTeX setup, I would have to download my bibliography and save it into a file. When doing this again for every paper, I sooner or later end up with many versions of my BibTeX entries, since I introduce some abbreviations in order to squeeze the whole thing into some random page limit, or maybe I correct some things, etc. etc.

Managing my references in BibSonomy should however help me to centralize them and be consistent throughout all of my works. This is where BibLaTeX (and biber) comes into play. Using BibLaTeX, I am able to not only provide a file as input for BibTeX, but also a web URL. Luckily, BibSonomy allows us to export a reference list as bibtex using a simple webcall. For example, if I want to export the list of publications that I tagged with myown (which can be found at https://www.bibsonomy.org/user/thoni/myown) as a BibTeX file, I simply add a /bib directly after the base URL: https://www.bibsonomy.org/bib/user/thoni/myown.

Finally, I enter the following command into my LaTeX main file:

\addbibresource[location=remote]{https://www.bibsonomy.org/bib/user/thoni/myown}

and poof, I have access to all my standardized references that I worked so hard to assemble.

Have fun writing your paper, thesis, commentary... :)