What is search-bibtex?

PolyCite is a command-line tool that helps researchers find accurate citation data for academic papers. When writing a paper, authors need to list references in a specific format called BibTeX. Doing this by hand is slow, and using AI assistants to generate references often produces errors such as wrong authors, wrong years, or papers that do not exist at all. This tool is built to solve those problems. Given a PDF of a paper, a title string, or an existing bibliography file, the tool contacts multiple academic databases at once: DBLP, arXiv, Crossref, OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar, and DOI resolution services. It collects candidate results, scores them by how well they match the title, authors, year, and identifiers, then presents a ranked list for the user to pick from. An interactive terminal menu lets the user navigate candidates with keyboard shortcuts, filter results, and confirm a choice. For scripts or automated pipelines, a flag lets the user select a result by index without any interactive prompt. The tool can also update an existing bibliography file in place: it re-queries each entry, replaces the metadata with fresher data from the databases, and keeps the original citation keys intact so references in the paper text do not break. Batch processing is supported for working through many papers at once. Distribution is through pre-built binaries for each platform placed in the repository's dist-bin folder, so no Node.js installation is required to run it. Source builds use pnpm and a Makefile. Configuration lives in a TOML file where the user can set source priority order, scoring weights for each field, how many candidates to return, and whether sources are queried in parallel. The README is written primarily in Chinese with English documentation available in a separate file.