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I work with a very large bibtex file when I write articles. The bib file is in version control and is collaboratively edited by a large group of scholars with similar interests. This creates a 'moving target', which means that if I go back to compile an article that was written years ago, some of its references may have been changed, so the result does not equal the original, as it would have compiled then. At the same time, creating multiple copies of this very large bib file would be very inefficient.

One solution is to simply save a pdf of the compiled document in version control (I do this currently, and will continue to do this). Additionally, I also wondered if it is not possible to just add the bbl file to version control. That way you don't need to access any bib file to compile the document as it was. Is this a valid approach? Any drawbacks? Other suggestions?

reynoldsnlp
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  • Do you have access to a utility program that extracts just the cited entries from the bib file and can create a new bib file? That way, even if the full bib file is potentially very large, the one that's used for the final (or near-final) version of the paper needn't be particularly large. – Mico Nov 26 '15 at 17:14
  • @Mico I don't know which utilities do that. That would be an excellent solution. – reynoldsnlp Nov 26 '15 at 18:59
  • You can extract the cited records with bibexport – Guido Nov 26 '15 at 20:05
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    Please see my answer in question http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/136837/extracting-only-the-bibtex-records-relevant-to-the-paper/136865#136865 – Mensch Nov 26 '15 at 20:33
  • Which front-end editing software do you use? If it happens to be WinEdt, you could install and make use of the excellent bibMacros add-in package. One of the add-ins makes it trivially easy to create a new bib file that contains just the entries cited in your tex document. – Mico Nov 26 '15 at 20:50

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