Quick Start Guide

In this guide, we’ll help you get started with OneCite in just a few minutes.

1. Installation

First, install OneCite using pip:

pip install onecite

2. Create Your Input File

Create a file named references.txt with your mixed-format references.

Important: Add blank lines between entries to avoid misidentification.

Example references.txt:

10.1038/nature14539

Attention is all you need, Vaswani et al., NIPS 2017

Goodfellow, I., Bengio, Y., & Courville, A. (2016). Deep Learning. MIT Press.

https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow

10.5281/zenodo.3233118

arXiv:2103.00020

Smith, J. (2020). Neural Architecture Search. PhD Thesis. Stanford University.

3. Process Your References

Run OneCite to process your file:

onecite process references.txt -o results.bib --quiet

The --quiet flag suppresses verbose output. Remove it if you want to see processing details.

4. View Your Results

Your results.bib file now contains 7 perfectly formatted entries in BibTeX format:

@article{LeCun2015Deep,
  doi = "10.1038/nature14539",
  title = "Deep learning",
  author = "LeCun, Yann and Bengio, Yoshua and Hinton, Geoffrey",
  journal = "Nature",
  year = 2015,
  volume = 521,
  number = 7553,
  pages = "436-444",
  publisher = "Springer Science and Business Media LLC",
  url = "https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539",
  type = "journal-article",
}

@inproceedings{Vaswani2017Attention,
  arxiv = "1706.03762",
  title = "Attention Is All You Need",
  author = "Vaswani, Ashish and Shazeer, Noam and Parmar, Niki and Uszkoreit, Jakob and Jones, Llion and Gomez, Aidan N. and Kaiser, Lukasz and Polosukhin, Illia",
  year = 2017,
  journal = "arXiv preprint",
  url = "https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762",
}

Common Command-Line Options

Output Formats:

# Generate APA formatted citations
onecite process refs.txt --output-format apa

# Generate MLA formatted citations
onecite process refs.txt --output-format mla

Interactive Mode:

# Use interactive mode for ambiguous entries
onecite process refs.txt --interactive

Batch Processing:

# Process BibTeX file
onecite process input.bib -o output.bib

For more advanced usage, see Advanced Usage.

Using OneCite as a Python Library

You can also use OneCite directly in your Python scripts:

from onecite import process_references

result = process_references(
    input_content="Deep learning review\nLeCun, Bengio, Hinton\nNature 2015",
    input_type="txt",
    template_name="journal_article_full",
    output_format="bibtex",
    interactive_callback=lambda candidates: 0  # Auto-select first match
)

# Print formatted citations
for citation in result['results']:
    print(citation)

# Check processing report
print(f"\nProcessed {result['report']['succeeded']}/{result['report']['total']} entries")

For more details, see Python API Reference.

Next Steps