Fix common exported BibTeX author formatting in Python (and Vim) 📜

This script changes Lastname, Firstname to Firstname Lastname (in LaTeX BibTeX bibliography entries).

A common exporting format of BibTeX on e.g. scholar.google.com is this (sample article):

@article{fournier2017survey,
  title={A survey of sequential pattern mining},
  author={Fournier-Viger, Philippe and Lin, Jerry Chun-Wei and Kiran, Rage Uday and Koh, Yun Sing and Thomas, Rincy},
  journal={Data Science and Pattern Recognition},
  volume={1},
  number={1},
  pages={54--77},
  year={2017}
}

Notice the formatting of the authors: Fournier-Viger, Philippe and Lin, Jerry Chun-Wei and Kiran, Rage Uday and Koh, Yun Sing and Thomas, Rincy

Running this script on this string changes it to: Philippe Fournier-Viger and Jerry Chun-Wei Lin and Rage Uday Kiran and Yun Sing Koh and Rincy Thomas

Add this to your .vimrc:

vnoremap <leader>af c<C-R>=system('authorfix', getreg('"'))[:-2]<CR><ESC>x

authorfix needs to be in your PATH for this.

curl \
  -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/lolei/authorfix/master/authorfix.py \
  -o $HOME/.local/bin/authorfix && chmod +x $HOME/.local/bin/authorfix

I use additional automatic fixes in Vim for imported BibTeX entries:

• Title Case Capitalization
• Converting {} to ""

• Inspired by nickjj/title-case-converter
• I had a working regex to to the same in sed, but for some reason in wouldn't work in vim: s/\v(?!and\b)\b([[:alpha:]-]+ ?[[:alpha:]-]*)(,) ([[:alpha:]-]+ ?[[:alpha:]-]*)\b(?<!\b and)/\3 \1/g
  • Also this Python version handles if a person has multiple last names, and will enclose them in {}, which makes LaTeX use them correctyl in citations.