Excursus

Academics tend to be pretty good at sharing resources. For example, most publish their research online. This is really helpful since it can take a year or two after submission to finally see its way into print.

One useful thing that academics share, though less often than their research, is their bibliographies. LaTeX is predominant in academia, though not universally so. So many of these online bibliographies are BibTeX files. See Benj Hellie’s BibTeX file as an example.

Sometimes, these have been converted to HTML. Sometimes, as in Benj’s case, the author simply posts the text file (BibTeX is a flat file database kept in plain text). This has some limitations. One problem is that the author has to periodically export to HTML, and even if he is posting the text file, it still needs to be uploaded to the server. Unlikely that this is done after each change to the bibliography.

From the users side, there are problems too. Suppose I have downloaded Benj’s BibTeX file. Some time passes, and I want to take advantage of Benj’s hard work. Some of the entries I already have, some are new. Some of the new entries may overlap with entries that I have made independently. Manually merging this material can be a pain, even with diff tools.

All of this would be a lot easier if academics used distributed version control to share their bibliographies. Suppose the distributed version control system in question is Git. When an author makes a change to his bibliography, then all he need do is to commit the change and push to the remote repository:

$ git commit mybibtexfile.bib
$ git push

From the users side, to download the bibliography all he need do is clone the git repository:

$ git clone git@github.com:PhilGeek/bib.git

After that, fetching and merging new changes is easy as:

$ git pull

Well, I am putting my money where my mouth is and publishing my BibTeX file in an open Git repository hosted at GitHub—http://github.com/PhilGeek/bib/tree/master. To clone this repository:

$ git clone git@github.com:PhilGeek/bib.git

Even if you are not a Git user and are shy about adopting new technology, the file can be viewed and downloaded here.

There is not as much in it as there should be. Before becoming a plain text Geek, I kept my bibliography in EndNote. Unfortunately, my EndNote file, a proprietary binary format, became corrupted before I could convert it to BibTeX. Yet another cautionary tale speaking in favor of the Power of Plain Text.