[R] Creating bibtex file of all installed packages?

[Achim Zeileis]

On Wed, 16 Dec 2009, S Devriese wrote:

> On 12/16/2009 08:32 AM, Achim Zeileis wrote:
>> On Tue, 15 Dec 2009, Michael Friendly wrote:
>>
>>> Achim and others:
>>>
>>> Achim's solution could be directly usable if it also added a BibTeX key,
>>> perhaps just the name of the package to the '@Manual{,' initial line
>>> of each. I wrapped the previous suggestions in a function, and played
>>> around with the components, but can't quite see how to account for the
>>> failed citation calls.  Can anyone take the next step?
>>
>> I had also thought about this after sending my previous solution, so
>> here is an update Michael's version of the function (renamed to the
>> name of the default file). Apart from some smaller touch-ups this has
>> the following changes:
>>
>>   - Instead of taking the unique() bibs, I now use the unique() pkgs.
>>
>>     (In principle, packages with the same name could be installed in
>>     different libraries, potentially containing different citations.
>>     But I thought it would be overkill to check for that.)
>>
>>   - Citation keys are simply "pkgname" if there is only a single
>>     BibTeX item, and "pkgname1" to "pkgnameN" if there are N BibTeX
>>     items.
>>
>>     (This does not assure that citation keys are unique, though. If
>>     there is a package "foo" with 2 citation entries and another package
>>     "foo2" with only a single entry, these could be confused. A
>> workaround
>>     would be to use "pkgname1" instead of "pkgname" as the citation key
>>     even if there is a single citation only. But I thought that would
>>     be less intuitive.)
> Another possibility would be to use pkgname_versionnumber (e.g.
> lattice1226). This would probably provide uniqueness and if used on
> subsequent updates  of packages does not break older (latex) documents
> where previous versions of packages were used.
> Just a thought.

No, it doesn't. As pointed out above, the function currently only calls 
citation() once for each package name (i.e., ignores multiple versions if 
any). The multiple entries do not stem from multiple versions of the 
package, but from multiple citations within a single package. See

   citation("sandwich")

for an example.
Z

> Stephan
>
>