knitr (version 1.29)

write_bib: Generate BibTeX bibliography databases for R packages

Description

This function uses utils::citation() and utils::toBibtex() to create bib entries for R packages and write them in a file. It can facilitate the auto-generation of bibliography databases for R packages, and it is easy to regenerate all the citations after updating R packages.

Usage

write_bib(
  x = .packages(),
  file = "",
  tweak = TRUE,
  width = NULL,
  prefix = getOption("knitr.bib.prefix", "R-")
)

Arguments

x

Package names. Packages which are not installed are ignored.

file

The (.bib) file to write. By default, or if NULL, output is written to the R console.

tweak

Whether to fix some known problems in the citations, especially non-standard format of author names.

width

Width of lines in bibliography entries. If NULL, lines will not be wrapped.

prefix

Prefix string for keys in BibTeX entries; by default, it is R- unless option('knitr.bib.prefix') has been set to another string.

Value

A list containing the citations. Citations are also written to the file as a side effect.

Details

For a package, the keyword R-pkgname is used for its bib item, where pkgname is the name of the package. Citation entries specified in the CITATION file of the package are also included. The main purpose of this function is to automate the generation of the package citation information because it often changes (e.g. author, year, package version, ...).

Examples

# NOT RUN {
write_bib(c("RGtk2", "gWidgets"), file = "R-GUI-pkgs.bib")
unlink("R-GUI-pkgs.bib")

write_bib(c("animation", "rgl", "knitr", "ggplot2"))
write_bib(c("base", "parallel", "MASS"))  # base and parallel are identical
write_bib("cluster", prefix = "")  # a empty prefix
write_bib("digest", prefix = "R-pkg-")  # a new prefix
write_bib("digest", tweak = FALSE)  # original version

# what tweak=TRUE does
str(knitr:::.tweak.bib)
# }