Rebiber

Replace unofficial / arXiv BibTeX entries with official DBLP or ACL Anthology records. Cite keys are kept.

Web demo · Colab

Install from GitHub only. We do not publish or support PyPI (pip install rebiber is a 2021 1.1.3 release).

Install

Requires Python 3.10 or newer. Rebiber 1.4 uses bibtexparser 2 (>=2,<3).

uv tool install git+https://github.com/yuchenlin/rebiber
# or
pip install "rebiber @ git+https://github.com/yuchenlin/rebiber"

Develop from a checkout:

git clone https://github.com/yuchenlin/rebiber.git && cd rebiber
uv sync --extra dev          # or: pip install -e ".[dev]"
uv run pytest

Changes in 1.4

• Migrate to bibtexparser 2 and raise the minimum Python version from 3.8 to 3.10.
• Preserve single-space field indentation and one blank line between entries.
• Apply field removal, venue abbreviation, field selection, title protection, and sorting to entries with repeated cite keys when -d False is set.

Usage

Omitting -o overwrites each -i file. Start with --dry-run.

rebiber -i refs.bib --dry-run
rebiber -i refs.bib --dry-run --report changes.txt
rebiber -i refs.bib -o refs.official.bib
rebiber -i refs.bib --used-in paper.tex appendix.tex
rebiber -i refs.bib --live-lookup          # opt-in DBLP search after a local miss
rebiber -i *.bib -o ./normalized/
rebiber -i refs.bib --format-only -o pretty.bib
rebiber -i refs.bib --keep author,title,booktitle,journal,year,volume,number,pages,doi --protect-titles

Examples: examples/input.bib → examples/output.bib.

Leftover unofficial arXiv entries may still query the arXiv API for year / primaryClass. Use --format-only for a fully offline run.

Matching

• Authors. A title hit converts only if the first-author last names match or at least two last names overlap. Empty/missing authors never match (including with --no-check-authors). Trailing et al. / et.al. / and others are stripped.
• Titles. Digit-preserving key first (16x16 ≠ 32x32), then the letters-only key used by older dumps.
• Live DBLP. Prefers a published (non-arXiv/CoRR) hit; skips if several published hits remain. Digit keys must agree.
• eprint. If the input has an arXiv id and the official record does not, it is copied onto the replacement (local dump and live).
• ArXiv form. Unofficial preprints become @misc with eprint / archivePrefix / primaryClass. Already-published papers are not rewritten because an abstract mentions arXiv.
• Broken entries. Unparsed or unclosed records are kept, not dropped.

Build a dump JSON:

uv run python -m rebiber.bib2json -i path/to/conf.bib -o path/to/conf.json

Example

@article{lin2020birds,
  title={Birds have four legs?! NumerSense: Probing Numerical Commonsense Knowledge of Pre-trained Language Models},
  author={Lin, Bill Yuchen and Lee, Seyeon and Khanna, Rahul and Ren, Xiang},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2005.00683},
  year={2020}
}

becomes the official EMNLP 2020 @inproceedings (same cite key), with anthology URL and DOI.

Supported venues

Toggle files in rebiber/bib_list.txt. ACL Anthology includes *CL main conferences and workshops. Other dumps are main tracks only (no CVPR/ICCV workshops).

A monthly Action opens a PR with fresh DBLP + anthology data. Years below are what is in this repo, not “whatever DBLP has tomorrow.”

Kept current (monthly job + recent dumps)

Not in the index: COLM (empty DBLP toc). ICLR/ICML/CVPR 2026, RSS/CoRL 2025, ECCV 2026 — not on DBLP yet.

Historical (frozen ~2020): ALENEX, ASONAM, BigData, CIDR, CIKM, COLT, MM, RecSys, SDM, SIGMOD (through 2022; later years are PACMMOD), SODA, STOC, WSDM.

Thanks to Anton Tsitsulin for the original dump collection.

Adding a venue

uv run python -m rebiber.download_dblp --confs iclr --start-year 2026

That writes rebiber/data/{conf}{year}.bib.json and appends bib_list.txt when needed. PRs welcome.

Star history

In-repo SVGs, refreshed weekly from the GitHub API (no third-party token).

Contact

billyuchenlin@gmail.com · i@yuchenlin.xyz · GitHub issues