cleaning up bibtex files.

[Peter Flynn]

On 22/09/2019 17:50, Mike Marchywka wrote:
[...]
> I guess I was curious if there is some preferred format as long as I
> have gone to this much effort. My biggest concern was making sure 
> everything I got off the web was indicated as such with a url and I
> wanted to preserve download time to retrace what I was doing. I put
> all of this in "comments" but curious if putting it into the bibtex
> would hurt anything.

I don't think so, but this is one of many reasons I store all my 
references in DocBook XML, and run an XSLT script to create BiBTeX files 
when I need to. I try to pick "EndNote XML" export format from web site 
and biblio applications wherever possible because I have a script to 
handle that.

That way I *know* everything is named and labelled correctly, and if 
biblatex formatters change how the use fields, I can easily modify the 
script and just regenerate the files. If I had to generate old BiBTeX 
files, I could also do that.

> In particular, the field values seem to randomly be quoted or braced
> and I just made them all braced. Does this lose something?

Not as far as I know. The rule is, if the field value is an integer (eg 
a year) it doesn't need braces, otherwise it does.

Peter