reference-shortener

name	reference-shortener
description	Shortens a LaTeX paper's cited references (authors to "et al.", journal abbreviations, DOI cleanup) by recompiling with latexmk until the paper fits a target page count. Use when a paper's bibliography overflows onto an extra page and needs to be compacted without dropping entries.
license	MIT

reference-shortener

Compiles a LaTeX paper with latexmk and applies cleanups to the cited references — recompiling after each step and stopping as soon as the paper fits the target page count. The referenced .bib file(s) are rewritten with the smallest set of cleanups that reaches the target.

Order:

1. Clear the location field (and its BibTeX equivalent address) — few styles print it, so it is the cheapest information to lose
2. Normalize DOIs (strip https://doi.org/ prefixes and similar) — a cleanup any well-formed paper wants anyway
3. Clean up URLs (unwrap redirect wrappers such as google.de/url?...&url=..., decode escapes) — likewise
4. Shorten author lists to the first author + "and others" (rendered as "et al.")
5. Remove the month field
6. Abbreviate journal names (JabRef's bundled journal-abbreviation list)
7. Shorten DOIs to the 10/xxx form via shortdoi.org — the very last resort, since not everyone likes short DOIs

Installation

Requires JBang and either a local TeX distribution (latexmk) or Docker (falls back to the Island of TeX texlive/texlive image).

jbang app install reference-shortener@koppor/reference-shortener

One-off run without installation:

jbang reference-shortener@koppor/reference-shortener paper.tex

Usage

# Shorten until the paper is one page shorter than it currently is
reference-shortener paper.tex

# Shorten until the paper fits 6 pages
reference-shortener paper.tex --pages 6

# Write the shortened bibliography elsewhere instead of overwriting (single .bib only)
reference-shortener paper.tex --pages 6 --output shortened.bib

Notes for agents

• The .tex file must be a local path inside the paper's project directory; the whole directory is staged to a temp copy for compilation, so the user's tree is only touched once a validated result exists.
• Both BibTeX (\bibliography) and biblatex (\addbibresource) papers work; latexmk drives the needed bibtex/biber reruns automatically.
• If the target cannot be reached even after all cleanups, the tool applies its best effort, rewrites the .bib, reports the achieved page count on stderr, and still exits 0.
• A paper that already fits is left untouched ("nothing to shorten").
• Everything runs offline except the last-resort DOI-shortening step, which queries shortdoi.org; it is reached only when author and journal shortening did not suffice, and is skipped gracefully (with a warning) when the network is unavailable.
• Exit codes: 0 = OK (target reached, best effort, or nothing to do), 2 = usage error (bad --pages, missing bibliography, --output with multiple .bib files), 1 = compile or I/O failure.