bibtex-exclude

bibtex-exclude is a tool to help with conducting a literature review by applying exclusion criteria to entries within BibTeX files.

Install:

npm install bibtex-exclude --global

Instructions

1. Create a directory to work in. Within this, create the directories databases and exclusion.

2. Search academic databases and export results as BibTeX into the databases directory. E.g. you might put the exported results of a search on ACM DL in databases/acm.bib.

3. Run bibtex-exclude. Results from each database will be combined (with duplicates merged) and output to results.bib.

4. Read through results.bib. Any results which don't conform to your review inclusion criteria should be copied and pasted to bib files in the exclusion/ directory. The name for each bib file should correspond to the reason for exclusion - e.g. exclusion/not-empirical.bib might contain any BibTeX entries which correspond to papers which do not report empirical findings.

5. Run node index.js to update results.bib. Again, the results from each database will be included. Any entries in the exclusion bib files will be removed. The tool will also output the count of results at each stage, e.g.:

   Loading databases...
                           acm: 40
                     ebscohost: 129
                         jstor: 12
                         known: 17
                        pubmed: 15
                        scopus: 355
                  webofscience: 151
                         Total: 719
   
   Removing duplicates...
                    duplicates: (240)
                         Total: 479
   
   Applying exclusions...
                     off-topic: (256)
              not-quantitative: (137)
                 not-empirical: (38)
                   not-english: (13)
                TOTAL ELIGIBLE: 35 (479 - 444)
   Results written to results.bib

If you wish to repeat the literature review in the future, you can re-use the exclusion lists to exclude those records from new database results. This makes it much easier to keep a literature review up-to-date.

Exclusion lists could also be built from database searches for papers which should not form part of your results.

Use option --new to write results to results1.bib if results.bib already exists, where results1.bib will only include results which are not already in results.bib. If results1.bib already exists, then results will be written to results2.bib, which will only include results not in results.bib or results1.bib, etc.