This is a short version of Do yourself a favor: learn Markdown – Episode 7: BibTeX for online articles

Summary: Generate BibTeX from URL for web pages, blogs, articles online, etc.

In a previous article (Sgro (2022)) I presented how to add bibliographical information within an Rmarkdown document (Allaire et al. (2023)) with the BibTex format in order to include books, but mostly published articles with a PubMed entry.

This short post is to provide a tool to ease the creation of a BibTex entry for online articles, blogs, etc. using the free tool. “Generate BibTeX from URL” (Dzialowski (2023)) that I have just used for the dplyr posts (Sgro (2023a) and Sgro (2023b).)

Here is a simple example: creating a BibTeX entry for the Faculty page of the Biochemistry Department:

1. Go to the web site: www.getbibtex.com/
2. Enter the web address in the text box.
3. Press the “Get BibTeX” button.

The results will appear below in the BibTeX format that can be copied.

@misc{dnaDNAtodayx2013,
author = {},
title = {{D}{N}{A}.today \– {G}enomics of the 21-st {C}entury — dna.today},
howpublished = {\url{https://dna.today/}},
year = {},
note = {[Accessed 26-12-2023]},
}

We can now make some minor adjustments by hand now that the information is in the correct format. I typically do the following:

Edit the title (within to @misc{}) as it is derived from the TITLE entry of the web page.
Fill-in author and year often left blank.

The edited is done on the complete entry which has been pasted as text into a local file which I usually call online.bib.

To use the reference within the Rmarkdown text we add @ before the title.

References

Allaire, JJ, Yihui Xie, Christophe Dervieux, Jonathan McPherson, Javier Luraschi, Kevin Ushey, Aron Atkins, et al. 2023. Rmarkdown: Dynamic Documents for r. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=rmarkdown.

Dzialowski, Karol. 2023. “URL to BibTeX Generator – Get BibTeX for Any Website.” https://www.getbibtex.com/.

“Faculty — Biochem.wisc.edu.” 2023. https://biochem.wisc.edu/faculty/.

Sgro, Jean-Yves. 2022. “Do Yourself a Favor: Learn Markdown – Episode 5. BibTeX Interface for PubMed.” https://bcrf.biochem.wisc.edu/2022/10/28/do-yourself-a-favor-learn-markdown-episode-5-bibtex-interface-for-pubmed/.

———. 2023a. “Data Exploration in R with Tidyverse Dplyr – Part 1 – Overview.” https://bcrf.biochem.wisc.edu/2023/12/26/data-exploration-in-r-with-tidyverse-dplyr-part-1-overview/.

———. 2023b. “Data Exploration in R with Tidyverse Dplyr – Part 2 – 10 Examples.” https://bcrf.biochem.wisc.edu/2023/12/26/data-exploration-in-r-with-tidyverse-dplyr-part-2-10-examples/.