Script for downloading bibtex file using DOI

Digital Object Identifier (DOI) and bibtex files are common for anyone citing scientific articles. The DOI is used to uniquely identify any object, such as an electronic document, while bibtex is used to cite an article in Latex environment.

An article can be found on the internet via the address dx.doi.org/ followed by the DOI, e.g. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ocemod.2004.08.002. However, it takes a while to browse the publishers website, locate the appropriate bibtex file and save it to disk.

Here is a very handy Python script that fetches a bibtex file from NASA’s Astrophysics Data System using the article’s DOI.

It requires Python Beautiful Soup XML/HTML parser.
In Ubuntu-like linux distributions it can be installed easily:
sudo apt-get install python-beautifulsoup

Example:

>>doi2bibtex.py 10.1016/j.ocemod.2004.08.002
@ARTICLE{2005OcMod...9..347S,
author = {{Shchepetkin}, A.~F. and {McWilliams}, J.~C.},
title = "{The regional oceanic modeling system (ROMS): a split-explicit, free-surface, topography-following-coordinate oceanic model}",
journal = {Ocean Modelling},
year = 2005,
volume = 9,
pages = {347-404},
doi = {10.1016/j.ocemod.2004.08.002},
adsurl = {http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2005OcMod...9..347S},
adsnote = {Provided by the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System}
}