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Generate Bibliography file from multiple files with Pandoc

I have several chapters with citations. My citation file is in bibtex format. I would like to create a formatted bibliography that includes all the citations from the chapters in a single file (publisher prefers DOCX). How can I do this?

Solution

  • If the bibtex file contains no additional citations, then it would be sufficient to have a small nocite.md Markdown file to generate the bibliography:

    ---
nocite: '@*'
---

# Bibliography

    Calling pandoc --output=bibliography.docx --bibliography YOUR_BIBTEX.bib nocite.md will generate a docx file with formatted entries for all items in YOUR_BIBTEX.bib.

    The more general case is that the bibtex file contains additional entries which should be omitted from the bibliography. One will need a way to limit output to citations used in the document(s). A good method is to use a Lua filter to rewrite the document as needed.

    -- save this file as "bib-only.lua"

local cites = {}

-- collect all citations
function Cite (cite)
  table.insert(cites, cite)
end

-- use citations, but omit rest of the document
function Pandoc (doc)
  doc.meta.nocite = cites
  doc.blocks = {}
  return doc
end

    Running

    pandoc --lua-filter bib-only.lua -o bib.docx chapter1.md chapter2.md chapter3.md

    should give the desired output.