phpBibLib: a PHP Bibtex Library

So, you've published a nice number of papers, keep their details in a .bib file, and want to easily display them on a website? Or, you've got yourself some content on your website in which you would like to include some citations, and show the relevant publications below?

Look no further.

Enter, phpBibLib

phpBibLib provides you an easy and modular way of parsing and displaying the contents of a .bib file. You can query the contents of the bibtex file either directly, or by making cites within a text. As an example of the former, say we want to display the publications of author 'Vreeken' in the year 2011:

$bib = new Bibtex('references.bib');
$bib->Select(array('author' => 'Vreeken', 'year' => 2011));
$bib->PrintBibliography();

which as output gives

[1]	Mampaey, M., Tatti, N. & Vreeken, J. Tell Me What I Need To Know: Succinctly Summarising Data by Itemsets. In Proc. KDD'11, 2011.
[2]	Miettinen, P. & Vreeken, J. Model Order Selection for Boolean Matrix Factorization. In Proc. KDD'11, ACM, 2011.
[3]	Remmerie, N., Vijlder, T.D., Valkenborg, D., Laukens, K., Smets, K., Vreeken, J., Mertens, I., Carpentier, S., Panis, B., Jaeger, G.d., Prinsen, E. & Witters, E. Unraveling tobacco BY-2 protein complexes with BN PAGE/LC-MS/MS and clustering methods. Journal of Proteomics, Elsevier, 2011.
[4]	Smets, K. & Vreeken, J. The Odd One Out - Identifying and Characterising Anomalies. In Proc. SDM'11, 2011.
[5]	Tatti, N. & Vreeken, J. Comparing Apples and Oranges: Measuring Differences between Data Mining Results. In Proc. ECMLPKDD'11, 2011.

Which is pretty neat, for such simple code.

Alternatively, we could have some content in which we would like to refer to bibliographic entries printed below. E.g.

There exist many ways to extract interesting associations from data <?cite('vreeken25', 
'siebes06', 'DBLP:journals/tkde/MiettinenMGDM08');?>. A big breakthrough was made by 
<?citet('agrawal93')?>, who proposed association rules <?cite($bb, 'agrawal93')?>.

with which we get

This and that has long been known to be such and so [?,1,2]. Furthermore, Agrawal et al. [3] clearly did not [3].

[1]	Siebes, A., Vreeken, J. & van Leeuwen, M. Item Sets that Compress. In Proc. SDM'06, pages 393-404, 2006.
[2]	Miettinen, P., Mielikäinen, T., Gionis, A., Das, G. & Mannila, H. The Discrete Basis Problem. IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng., 20(10):1348-1362, 2008.
[3]	Agrawal, R., Imielinksi, T. & Swami, A. Mining association rules between sets of items in large databases. In Proc. SIGMOD'93, pages 207-216, ACM, 1993.

Which, again, is pretty neat, especially considering we can handle different bibliographic styles (numeric, abbreviated, natbib), orders, and can combine the above demonstrated cites and selections; all through a very simple interface.

Download

The most current version of the library (currently v1.0.7, 25/02/2017) can be downloaded right here where you currently are.

phpBibLib is postcard-ware, that is, it may be used freely for non-commercial purposes; if you use it, however, I would be thrilled to receive a (tacky?) (touristy?) real postcard from wherever you are (see here for my current address). (If you are a cheapskate, or afraid of postcards, just let me know by email that you use it. You know, for kicks.)

Usage

Documentation for the library is, well, neither quite completely finished, nor will it likely ever reach that state.

Instead, I provide basic templates that should help you to get quickly started with phpBibLib. In addition, I provide examples for how to use it in either a static, or a sqlite cached set up. Live demonstrations of this functionality can be found here and here respectively.

Since v1.0.5, undocumented features include a) regular-expression based selection of references, b) fixed ordering, c) linking the title of a reference according to the tag 'paperurl' in the bibtex file, d) setting a base directory for if that target is a (eg PDF) file.

Contributors

The main author of the library is Jilles Vreeken. Many thanks, however, go to Siegfried Nijssen, Tobias Oetiker, Guenter Weber, Lucas Treffenstadt, Franck Samson, Joseph Tam, Kristina Scherbaum, for fixing bugs, and introducing features.