Bibliography tools

I maintain my bibliographic reference database in BibTeX format, managed by the fantastic BibDesk.

Sometimes it is convenient to use the command line to download a citation in BibTeX format, copy it to the clipboard and generate an entry in BibDesk.

curl -LH "Accept: text/bibliography; style=bibtex" https://doi.org/10.1038/nature13435 | pbcopy

This uses the https://doi2bib.org website, fetches the citation in BibTeX format and pipes it to the MacOS clipboard (pbcopy) - adapted from StackOverflow

Speeding up Zotero (found on the Zotero forum:

• Quit Zotero
• Open the Zotero database SQLite file using DB Browser for SQLite and chose Compact database. Maybe advisable to make a backup of the original file first, if you don't have that yet.
• Open Zotero again

Zotero & BibLaTeX – my previous setup was such that automagically generated BibTeX cite keys contained characters which failed compilation with biber. An easy workaround for this is in the Better BibTeX plugin for Zotero is to set the citation key generator pattern to [Auth:clean].[year]. I use Author.YYYY[a-z] as cite keys.