A small utility that uses BibTool to extract only the works cited in a Pandoc Markdown file from a BibTeX file.

If your workflow involves writing in Markdown and converting that Markdown to TeX with Pandoc, and you keep a large bibliography in a single BibTeX file, this utility will allow you to extract only the works cited in the Markdown file into a separate BibTeX file for distribution/portability.

It is intended as part of a transparent, plain text academic workflow.

It is based on this ruby Gist.

Ensure that BibTool is installed.

pip install extract_bib

To extract the references in great_paper.md that you keep in your ~/Documents/references.bib and place them in great_paper.bib, run:

extract_bib --bibtex-file ~/Documents/references.bib great_paper.md great_paper.bib