.TH BIB-KEY 1 "June 2026" "bibutils" "User Commands"
.SH NAME
bib-key \- generate citation keys for bibtex entries
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B bib-key
.RI [ file " ...]"
.SH DESCRIPTION
.B bib-key
reads bibtex entries from the named files (or standard input) and
emits them on standard output, in canonical form, with automatically
generated citation keys replacing the existing ones.
.PP
Keys have the form
.IR surname year word ,
for example
.BR knuth1984literate :
the lowercased surname of the first author (or editor, if there is no
author), the four-digit year, and the first word of the title that is
not a common stopword.
When two entries produce the same key, subsequent ones are
disambiguated with
.BR b ,
.BR c ,
\&... suffixes.
.SH EXIT STATUS
0 on success.
.SH ENVIRONMENT
.TP
.B BIBUTILS_LIB
Directory holding the shared awk library, overriding the default
search (lib/ next to the script, then /usr/local/share/bibutils).
.SH EXAMPLES
.nf
bib-fetch -d 10.1093/comjnl/27.2.97 | bib-key
.fi
.SH SEE ALSO
.BR bib-add (1),
.BR bib-gen (1),
.BR bib-util (1)