UPDATE

J.P. Knight left a much easier solution in the comments. If you want to see all of your citations the easy way, simply put the \nocite{*} command into your latex file as seen below.

\documentclass[11pt]{report} \usepackage{natbib} \bibpunct{(}{)}{;}{a}{,}{,} \begin{document} \bibliographystyle{apalike} \nocite{*} \bibliography{proposal}    %% your bib file name here \end{document}
Thanks J.P!
ORIGINAL

I’m currently writing my dissertation (technically my proposal) in LaTeX (think Microsoft Word without the WYSIWYG interface). As I’m searching for citations, I am overwhelmed at the number of sources in my bibtex file. Rather than staring at the bland, perhaps bloated, syntax with curly braces, spaces, and commas, I created a little script that would let me see how the citations will look in the paper–in a nice PDF bibliography. Here, I present seeAllCitations.sh which takes in your bibtex file as an argument and creates a file with all of your potential citations. After the script completes, just “compile” the file as you normally would and open the resulting pdf/dvi.

#!/bin/sh # Check input for one argument if [ $# -ne 1 ]; then echo "Please input your .bib file as an argument" echo "Example: ./seeAllCitations.sh proposal.bib" exit 1 fi #  Create the file echo "Creating seeAllCitations.tex that will allow you to see all citations." # Create a simple tex file that will include citations echo "\documentclass[11pt]{report} \usepackage{cite} \usepackage{url} \\\begin{document} \n All citations from $1 shown below \n %% Begin citations" > seeCitations.tex cat $1 |grep @ |sed s/^@.*{/\\\\\\cite{/ |sed s/,.*$/}\\\\\\\\/ >> seeCitations.tex echo "%% End citations \n \\\bibliographystyle{abbrv} \\\bibliography{$1} \n \\\end{document}" >> seeCitations.tex # Process completed echo "Process completed. Enjoy!" echo "Confused about what to do next? Create the document. For example: pdflatex seeCitations.tex bibtex seeCitations.tex pdflatex seeCitations.tex open seeCitations.pdf" exit 0

See any mistakes? Was that at all helpful? Do you have a different (read: better) method for checking your citations?