Convert a Bibtex class object to a series of text strings formatted for each citation

Question

I'm new to bibTex objects, and want to generate a list of text strings for each citation in the object as a formatted citation. I don't want to generate a document--these strings will be used for a downstream purpose within R. Is there a way to do this? I can't even really figure out how to access the pieces of each citation in a bibTex object.

Put another way, how to I turn this:

   temp <- toBibtex(c(citation("base"), citation("sp")))

into this:

  [[1]]
  [1] "R Core Team (2019). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. https://www.R-project.org/."

  [[2]]
  [1] "Pebesma, E.J., R.S. Bivand (2005). Classes and methods for spatial data in R. R News 5. https://cran.r-project.org/doc/Rnews/."

  [[3]]
  [1] "Bivand, R.S., Pebesma, E.J., Gomez-Rubio, V. (2013). Applied spatial data analysis with R, Second edition. Springer, NY. https://asdar-book.org/."

Help?

Answer 1

Using bib2df package:

library(bibtex)
library(bib2df)

write.bib(c("base", "sp"), "temp.bib")

x <- bib2df("temp.bib")

apply(x, 1, function(i){
  paste(
    #adding authors and titles
    paste(unlist(i$AUTHOR), collapse = ", "),
    i$TITLE,
    # add other bits here as needed
    sep = ", ")
})

# [1] "R Core Team, R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing"                                        
# [2] "Edzer J. Pebesma, Roger S. Bivand, Classes and methods for spatial data in {R"                               
# [3] "Roger S. Bivand, Edzer Pebesma, Virgilio Gomez-Rubio, Applied spatial data analysis with {R}, Second edition"

Note: I am new to bibtex, too. There is also RefManageR package, might be more useful.

---

Using RefManageR:

library(RefManageR)

# read bib file
x1 <- ReadBib("temp.bib")
# or convert citations to bibentry object
x2 <- as.BibEntry(c(citation("base"), citation("sp")))

Both will print as below:

# [1] R. S. Bivand, E. Pebesma, and V. Gomez-Rubio. _Applied spatial data analysis with R, Second
# edition_. Springer, NY, 2013. <URL: https://asdar-book.org/>.
# 
# [2] E. J. Pebesma and R. S. Bivand. “Classes and methods for spatial data in R”. In: _R News_ 5.2 (Nov.
#                                                                                                    2005), pp. 9-13. <URL: https://CRAN.R-project.org/doc/Rnews/>.
# [3] R Core Team. _R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing_. R Foundation for
# Statistical Computing. Vienna, Austria, 2019. <URL: https://www.R-project.org/>.

Answer 2

I think you can apply something like the following code:

pkgs <- c("base", "sp")
lapply(pkgs, function(x) citation(x)$textVersion)
#> [[1]]
#> [1] "R Core Team (2020). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. URL https://www.R-project.org/."
#> 
#> [[2]]
#> [[2]][[1]]
#> [1] "Pebesma, E.J., R.S. Bivand, 2005. Classes and methods for spatial data in R. R News 5 (2), https://cran.r-project.org/doc/Rnews/."
#> 
#> [[2]][[2]]
#> [1] "Roger S. Bivand, Edzer Pebesma, Virgilio Gomez-Rubio, 2013. Applied spatial data analysis with R, Second edition. Springer, NY. https://asdar-book.org/"

or, if you need precisely 1 reference per each element of the list, I think you can run:

as.list(unlist(lapply(pkgs, function(x) citation(x)$textVersion)))
#> [[1]]
#> [1] "R Core Team (2020). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. URL https://www.R-project.org/."
#> 
#> [[2]]
#> [1] "Pebesma, E.J., R.S. Bivand, 2005. Classes and methods for spatial data in R. R News 5 (2), https://cran.r-project.org/doc/Rnews/."
#> 
#> [[3]]
#> [1] "Roger S. Bivand, Edzer Pebesma, Virgilio Gomez-Rubio, 2013. Applied spatial data analysis with R, Second edition. Springer, NY. https://asdar-book.org/"

^{Created on 2020-09-30 by the reprex package (v0.3.0)}