[R] Creating bibtex file of all installed packages?

[S Devriese]

On 12/16/2009 10:12 AM, Achim Zeileis wrote:
> 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
>
I'm sorry my thoughts were somewhat confusing in the mail. I did catch
that the current mechanism to avoid multiple entries solves the one
package-multiple citations problem and not a multiple package-one
citiation problem. I was just thinking of a way to alter the function
when used sequentially in time. I know that was not the original
poster's problem, but  it's one I and several of my colleagues have
encountered often (and until the function posted here, we used a more
manual way of solving the problem of getting the citations of all
installed (or loaded) packages :-). I know that simply using seperate
.bib files for each latex document partially solves the
sequential-in-time problem, but this is actually a different topic, so I
probably should start a different thread.

Stephan