FAQ

Q: Why are the key and type properties of entries prefixed with ‘bib’?

In bibtex and biblatex, there are already key and a type fields. Per the bibtex documentation, the key field is:

Used for alphabetizing, cross referencing, and creating a label when the “author” information (described in Section 4) is missing.

and the type field is:

The type of a technical report—for example, “Research Note”.

Q: Why are there no conversion functions from and to JSON, XML etc.?

There are already a ton of excellent tools for the job such as pandoc, and I did not want to reinvent the wheel. Moreover, there are none or few standardised bibliography formats for the other file formats, making it hard to support.

Q: Why does bibpy replace my string variables with the empty string?

This is likely because a string variable was missing. The default behaviour of both bibtex and biblatex is to issue a warning regarding empty string substitution and perform the substitution.