How to validate (check) a biblatex .bib file?

Question

How can I validate the correctness a biblatex .bib file?

Where validate means checking for:

• Duplicate keys
• Missing mandatory fields

What tools do you use?

Answer 1

To validate my .bib files, I put together a Python script called Biblatex Checker.

It checks for missing fields, provides suggestions for common mistakes when using biblatex and identifies duplicate IDs.

It's based on BibTeX Check by Fabian Beck, which can be used for BibTeX files.

Answer 2

I use jabref. Install jabref, set it to biblatex mode. To do this go to Options → Preferences. In the window that opens, selectAdvanced and check BibLaTeX mode as shown below.

Then open your .bib file using jabref. Select the entries to be cleaned up. Under Tools menu, select cleanup entries. This window opens:

Now you know what to do :)

For duplicate keys, simply go to Tools → Autogenerate BibTeX keys. It will rewrite the duplicate key with some other name.

Answer 3

If you are only given the .bib file, try

biber --tool --validate-datamodel <filename>.bib

If your TeX document uses custom data types, try

biber --validate-datamodel <filename>.bcf

This should check all data sources.

Answer 4

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
\nocite{*}
\bibliographystyle{plain}
\bibliography{mybib}
\end{document}

Run latex and bibtex and then look into the logfile of the bibtex run (<filename>.blg). It has all warnings.

Answer 5

https://biblatex-linter.herokuapp.com/ provides an online Bibtex linter.

It's an Heroku app (Python/Django). It's open source and MIT licensed. https://github.com/Pezmc/BibLaTeX-Linter.

It's based on https://github.com/Pezmc/BibLaTeX-Check

Answer 6

BibTex Tidy is an open source online tool, I've used it, and personally I found it to be very reliable. It supports formatting and clean up, but also checks duplicate entries, including not just the key but also titles.

The tool's self-description is:

This tool tidies bibtex files by fixing inconsistent whitespace, removing duplicates, removing unwanted fields, and sorting entries.

Answer 7

bibtool v2.68 (April 2020)

bibtool (github) v2.68 has improved its double check (aka check for duplicates):

• The behaviour of the resource check.double has been generalized. The requirement of double entries to be adjacent has been dropped. This has the impact that the processing is slightly slower.

and added a new check unique.field:

• New resource file unique.field introduced. With this resource it is possible to specify additional unique constraints for fields. If different records have the same value for one of those fields, then a warning is issued.

Ensure you have v2.68 or newer (Homebrew for macOS already provides this version when this answer was written, ie. $ brew upgrade bib-tool gives you the new version)

❯ bibtool -V
BibTool Vers. 2.68 (C) 1996-2019 Gerd Neugebauer

Report duplicate keys

Following command reports records which share the same $key

❯ bibtool -- 'unique.field {$key}' -o '' unique_field_test.bib

For example, you could also check for duplicate dois.

❯ bibtool -- 'unique.field {doi}' -o '' unique_field_test.bib

Report about missing fields

I am not sure if this is already possible with bibtool.

Answer 8

On top of the tools that have already been suggested, you can try my bibcop package. You just \usepackage it in the document and any errors found in the .bib file will be reported as LaTeX warnings right in the TeX log:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{bibcop}
\begin{document}
\bibliographystyle{plain}
\bibliography{main}
\end{document}

Bibcop checks the formatting of the author, title, year, month, pages, and so on. If is written in Perl and you are welcome to submit your suggestions if you want it to be even stricter (it is pretty strict already!).

BTW, you can also use it as a command line tool to auto-fix your .bib file:

$ tlmgr install bibcop
$ bibcop --fix my.bib > fixed.bib