Gatsby transformer Bibtex

This plugin relies on gatsby-source-filesystem to detect bibtex files in your project and provide the associated nodes in GraphQL queries.

Usage

Adding the plugin

In your gatsby-config.js, add gatsby-source-filesystem and gatsby-transformer-bibtex, making sure that the former is before the latter.

plugins: [
  // ...,
  {
    resolve: `gatsby-source-filesystem`,
    options: {
      name: `documents`,
      path: `${__dirname}/src/assets/documents`,
    },
  },
  'gatsby-transformer-bibtex',
  // ...
]

The path you specify in the options of gatsby-source-filesystem must contain all the bibtex files, with a .bib extension.

Static Queries

Once added, the plugin will add Reference nodes to your GraphQL queries, allowing you for example to write the following query in a StaticQuery component or a page:

query {
  allReference {
    edges {
      node {
        key
        title
        authors
        journal
        date
      }
    }
  }
}

Special fields

Every field is simply the string value that was in the corresponding Bibtex entry, except for some fields that have a special behaviour.

• The entry_type field contains the type of the entry. For example, an entry starting with @article{... will have "article" in its entry_type field.
• The date field is either the provided issue_date if it exists, or year if it does not. It is always a string.
• The authors field is a list of the authors’ names, that has been extracted from the bibtex.
• The raw field contains the entire bibtex entry as a raw string.
• The youtubeId is created if a youtube field is in your bibtex file. If your youtube field contains a youtubeId, it’s just copied, if it contains a youtube link, the id is extracted from it.

Working with files

It is possible to work with local files, and to create fields of type File in your nodes. If in every of your entries, for a given field, the value is not specified (null) or it is a relative path to a file, then Gatsby will transform it into a File field provided by gatsby-source-filesystem. In particular, this field contains a publicURL field that is useful if you want to add a link to the file.

For example, if the path you gave to gatsby-source-fileystem contains

publications
    ├── paper_a.pdf
    └── publications.bib

where publications.bib contains

@article{some_key,
 author = {Name, Your and Of-Yours, Coauthor},
 title = {Paper A},
 ...
 file = {paper_a.pdf}
} 

In the code above, paper_a.pdf should be replaced by a path relative to where the .bib file is. Note that the parser does not handle comments, bibtex file should be kept comment-free.

I would also advise to keep the bibtex entries as simple as possible, since gatsby-transformer-bibtex has to handle fields manually, so only a limited amount of field will be working correctly.

Then you can create a component in the following way:

import React from "react"
import { StaticQuery, graphql } from "gatsby"

const ComponentName = () => (
  <StaticQuery
    query={graphql`
      {
        reference(key: {eq: "some_key"}) {
          file {
            publicURL
          }
        }
      }
    `}
    render={data => <a href={data.reference.file.publicURL}>Link to Paper A</a>}
  ></StaticQuery>
)

export default ComponentName

Contributions

This project is not extremely mature, but I’ve had feedback that it is used. PRs and issues are more than welcome 😁

LICENSE

This project is under MIT License, see License file.