Managing bibliography using Emacs Org-Mode and Org-Ref

org-ref is available on Melpa so to install it just type M-x package-install org-ref. Afterwards copy the code below to your init file and adjust the paths:

  (setq reftex-default-bibliography '("~/Dropbox/bibliography/references.bib"))
  ;; see org-ref for use of these variables
  (setq org-ref-bibliography-notes "~/Dropbox/bibliography/notes.org"
        org-ref-default-bibliography '("~/Dropbox/bibliography/references.bib")
        org-ref-pdf-directory "~/Dropbox/bibliography/bibtex-pdfs/")

  (setq bibtex-completion-bibliography "~/Dropbox/bibliography/references.bib"
        bibtex-completion-library-path "~/Dropbox/bibliography/bibtex-pdfs"
        bibtex-completion-notes-path "~/Dropbox/bibliography/helm-bibtex-notes")

With org-ref in place, it was time to setup the reading list so I created a new file named reading-list.org under ~/Dropbox/bibliography/ with the following header:

  #+TITLE: Reading list
  #+STATUS: "Maybe" "Pending" "Reading" "Finished" ""
  #+COLUMNS: %120ITEM %STATUS

The first line obviously defines the title of the document. The second line defines the values for status where:

• Maybe means that reading the entry is optional
• Pending - the entry will be read sometime after finishing the item that I'm currently reading
• Reading - the item currently being read
• Finished - the entries that are already read.

• Add bibtex entry in references.bib file. E.g.:

      @inproceedings{le2014distributed,
        title={Distributed representations of sentences and documents},
        author={Le, Quoc and Mikolov, Tomas},
        booktitle={Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML-14)},
        pages={1188--1196},
        year={2014}
      }
  

• In the reading-list.org file add the title to the list using M-return
• Add Status and Source properties
  • With the cursor on the header:
    • Press C-c C-x p
    • Select or write Status
    • Press return
    • Select the value for status (e. g. Pending)
    • Press return
  • With the cursor on the header:
    • Press C-c C-x p
    • Write or select Source
    • Press return
    • If you know the citation key (le2014distributed in the example above) then you can write directly cite:le2014distributed; otherwise, leave the value for Source empty and put the cursor after the property declaration. Then, press C-c ] and select the entry from the reference list.

Repeat the steps above and you should end up with a list like this:

To change the status of an entry:

• Navigate to the desired entry
• Repeat the steps above for setting the Status property and select the proper value for Status

After creating the list you may want to have an overview of the status for each entry. This can be achieved using Org Column View. The setup for column view is in the third line of the header

  #+COLUMNS: %120ITEM %STATUS

which tells org-mode how to display the entries. Namely, we're defining two columns:

1. Item which will display the heading on 120 characters and
2. Status which will take as much space as needed to display the status

1. The org-ref manual
2. Managing papers with Org-Mode and RefTex
3. Org Manual - Defining columns