Citations from BibTeX for Sublime Text

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2025-08-02 15:00

New Features:

• Reverse Lookup for Citations:

  • Hover over the citation key in your document to display a popup with the full title, author, and abstract (if available).

• Auto-Completion Insertion Settings:

  • Added an option to control the format of auto-completion when using Tab/Enter. You can now choose from the following:

    • "citekey": Inserts only the citation key (e.g., "@gandhi1933").
    • "title": Inserts only the title (e.g., "Truth, non-violence, and social justice.").
    • "both": Inserts both the citation key and the title (e.g., "@gandhi1933 Truth, non-violence, and social justice.").

    "completion_type": "citekey",

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This Sublime Text 3 plugin provides citation search and Tab-completion for citations stored in a BibTeX file. Configure the file path and you are good to go!

The default set up is optimized to work with AcademicMarkdown.

Uses the bibtexparser library from sciunto.

Configuration

You must specify the location of your BibTeX file or files in the Citer-sublime-settings preferences file. Multiple files can be added as a list.

Optionally you can define

• search_fields the BibTeX fields to search in when using Citer: Search
• citation_format the citation format
• completions_scopes the list of scopes to limit the operation of the plugin (by default, Citer will only suggest citations within plain text scopes and is disabled in source code)
• excluded_scopes list of scopes to explicitly exclude from Citer completions
• enable_completions enable/disable citation completions (when you hit @)
• quickview_format customise the format when listing library entries in the quickview panel (e.g. with the Citer: Show All command). Place variables between {} braces. Available variables are citekey, title, author, year.
• auto_merge_citations Whether to automatically merge citations that are inserted next to each other. [@Fred2000][@Mary2001] becomes [@Fred2000; @Mary2001]. Equivalent to running Citer: Combine adjacent citations on every insert

See below for example (default) configuration

{
    //REQUIRED:

    "bibtex_file ": "example/path/to/file.bib",
    // You can also specify a list
    //"bibtex_file_path": ["example/path/to/file.bib", "example/path/to/fileTwo.bib"],

    //OPTIONAL:

    //By default Citer Search looks for your keyword in the 
    //author, title, year, and Citekey (id) fields
    "search_fields": ["author", "title", "year", "id"] ,
    //Default format is @Citekey
    "citation_format": "@%s",
    //list of scopes. Could be top level "text" or "source", or limit to
    // e.g "text.html.markdown"
    "completions_scopes": ["text"],
    "enable_completions": true,
    //Customise the quickview of you library, using python format syntax
    "quickview_format": "{citekey} - {title}",
    "auto_merge_citations": false,
    "excluded_scopes": [],
}

Commands

Citer: Search - enter a search term. All results where the term is found in the author, title, citekey, or year fields will be shown (the searched fields are configurable)

Citer: Show All - show all the entries in your BibTeX in a quick view (you can then search in the title)

Citer: Insert Title - show all the entries in your BibTeX in a searchable quick view, inserts the title

Citer: Combine adjacent citations - Combines neighbouring citations i.e. [@Fred2000][@Mary2001] becomes [@Fred2000; @Mary2001]

Completions

Citer provides autocompletions for your citekeys, these are enabled by default and can be disabled in the config.

Compatibility

Citer has been tested with BibTeX generated by Mendeley, Jabref, and Zotero. It should work with any well-formed BibTeX file.

TODO

• Look into providing snippets for pandoc citation format in markdown files.

Licence

LGPLv3. See COPYING for details.