Help on CTAN

How can I retrieve a package's BibTeX entry?

If you want to cite a CTAN package it can be useful to have the reference to a package in form of a BibTeX entry. Such a reference can be retrieved with a URL like in the following example:

https://ctan.org/bibtex/pkg/luatex

The last component in the path of the URL is the package key as used in the context of CTAN. If you have more than one package in mind then you can specify them as last component and separated by commas.

As a result you will get a BibTeX file. This BibTeX file is self-contained and minimal. This means that all references occurring within the package's description and note are also included. This procedure is continued until no dangling references are left.

For instance the following content can be returned:

@STRING{CTAN="Comprehensive \TeX{} Archive Network"}

@online{ctan:pkg:luatex,
  author =	  {The Lua\TeX{} Team},
  title =	  {luatex -- The Lua\TeX{} engine},
  abstract =	  {Lua\TeX{} is an extended version of pdf\TeX{} using Lua as an embedded
      scripting language.  The Lua\TeX{} project’s main objective
      is to provide an open and configurable variant of \TeX{} while at the
      same time offering downward compatibility.

      Lua\TeX{} uses Unicode (as UTF-8) as its default input encoding, and
      is able to use modern (OpenType) fonts (for both text and mathematics).

      It should be noted that Lua\TeX{} is still under development; its
      specification has been declared stable, but absolute stability
      may not in practice be assumed.

      Source code is available from \texttt{ctan:/systems/texlive/source}.},
  url = 	  {https://ctan.org/pkg/luatex},
  urldate =	  {2018-08-05},
  organisation =  CTAN
}

The output is tailored towards the use of BibLaTeX. It uses the @online entry type and fields defined for it.

Parameters

Parameters can be used to customize the result. Those parameters are appended as HTTP parameters to the URL; i.e. they are added after a question mark as as key=value pairs. Several parameters are separated with an ampersand (&);

Type of the entries

As default the BibTeX entries produced for the export are using the type @online. This is inspired from BibLaTeX. This type can be overwritten with the parameter type. The parameter value is the type to be used instead. The following example produces BibTeX entries with the type @misc.

https://ctan.org/bibtex/pkg/luatex?type=misc

Suppressing the @STRING definition

As default the generated BibTeX file is self-contained. For this purpose @strings are defined for common phrases. This can be distracting if the resulting file is included in a larger context. Thus it is possible to suppress the inclusion of @strings with the parameter omit-string. The value is one of the booleans true or false. This can be seen in the following example:

https://ctan.org/bibtex/pkg/luatex?omit-string=true

Suppressing the dependency resolution

As a default all references found in the produced BibTeX entries are resolved and also included into the output. Thus behavior can be altered with the parameter omit-dependencies. The value is one of the booleans true or false. This can be seen in the following example:

https://ctan.org/bibtex/pkg/luatex?omit-dependencies=true