knitr (version 1.48)

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-"),
  lib.loc = NULL,
  packageURL = TRUE
)

Value

A list containing the citations. Citations are also written to the

file as a side effect.

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.

lib.loc

A vector of path names of R libraries.

packageURL

Use the URL field from the DESCRIPTION file. See Details below.

Author

Yihui Xie and Michael Friendly

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, ...).

There are at least two different uses for the URL in a reference list. You might want to tell users where to go for more information; in that case, use the default packageURL = TRUE, and the first URL listed in the DESCRIPTION file will be used. Be careful: some authors don't put the most relevant URL first. Alternatively, you might want to identify exactly which version of the package was used in the document. If it was installed from CRAN or some other repositories, the version number identifies it, and packageURL = FALSE will use the repository URL (as used by utils::citation()).

Examples

if (FALSE) { # interactive()
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)
}