Background
Purpose: This tool removes unused items from a .bib file.
Requirement: You have a .bbl file containing only used entries (e.g. automatically produced by BibTeX).
More precisely: Given .bib and .bbl files, this tool returns a reduced version of the .bib, the yescite, containing entries from .bib only if they occur in the .bbl.
Notes:- The yescite (reduced .bib file) preserves the entries of the .bib file that it keeps. This is advantageous compared to bibliography managers that modify your entries.
- The .bbl file is hidden for some editors. For example, in Overleaf, click "Logs and output files", scroll down, click "Other logs and files", click to download "output.bbl". If there is no .bbl file, try recompiling.
- Please create an issue on GitHub if you find problems.
Motivation: The .bib file for a project had become very large over time. I no longer cited many entries. Using \nocite{*} would show which entries I no longer cited, but there would still have been a lot of manual labour looking them up in the .bib and deleting them. Hence, yescite was intended to automatically find which entries I did cite, instead of those I did not.
Tidy my .bib
The tidied .bib includes:
and excludes:
.
