Simplifying the management of scientific reference and citation with a minimalist DOI-BibTex-LaTeX approach

Abstract

[Letter to Editor, Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases] Scientific citation is of undisputed importance in the field of scientific research. In the absence of a truly simple and functional tool for scientific reference and citation management, this article puts forward a minimalist DOI-BibTex-LaTeX approach, with which comes two advantages: 1), a scientific reference manager is as simple as one window of the File Explorer on Microsoft Windows®; 2), in the preparation of a scientific manuscript with LaTeX, there is no need to manually create a bibliography file, in-text citation will be as simple as a BibTex command \cite{DOI} without defeating the purpose of scientific citation. While scientific citation analysis keeps drawing attention from the science community [1,2,3], much less (if not zero) is paid to simplifying the production of in-text citation itself in the preparation of a scientific manuscript. As geneticist Yaniv Erlich (for whom the pain of managing references is real) tweeted, "We are far closer to a level 5 autonomous vehicle and space tourism than a functional citation manager.", which was chosen as quote of the day by Nature on June 7, 2018. Is