adding publications to your cv

Umesh recently discussed how to automate the ‘Publications’ section of LaTeX-based CVs (associated files, example CV). His desiderata for Publications: reverse chronological order; organization by type (e.g., for journals, conferences, abstracts and talks); and his name in bold. He doesn’t want to enter this stuff manually and he’d like it to match what shows up on his website.

For those who know Umesh, I’m not sure it really needs to be explained, but why LaTeX for this and not some other WYSIWYG option like Microsoft Word. Well, for one thing it’s WYSIWYG, which means it can be challenging to keep the formatting consistent. I want to say that using styles in most WYSIWYG makes consistent formatting relatively easy, although maybe not as straightforward as in LaTeX. Anyway, separation of content and style is a good idea and it’s something LaTeX is good at. And, though he didn’t mention it, there are lots of free tools for writing with it, absolving you of a lifetime of Office purchases.

One thing you might consider, though, is that some places require that you submit these kinds of documents as a .doc. Once upon a time, we worked really hard to convert a .tex, either directly or through the .pdf, into a .doc. Our conclusion then: if it can be done it’s highly non-trivial.

So BibTeX (what we use for references in LaTeX). It’s good for citing in papers, but getting it to do what we want (see list above) is tricky. Not to worry, it can be done with the datatool package. What follows is the version-by-version. Check the associated files for this post to see how this is done. You should be able to modify those files to make this stuff happen.

Version 1 looks ok, meaning it works, but the first thing is it’s not in reverse chronological (2008, 2009, 2003..).

Version 2 has the sorting worked out, starts with 2010, but isn’t grouped by type. It’s just a big list.

Version 3 gets grouping, and is only lacking (with respect to our list) in that names aren’t highlighted.

Version 4 has the name highlighting.

In summary, use BibTex and Datatool. Also, Rob’s bib2php (which I wrote about here) can use the same BibTex to add your references to your webpage. Other uses of Datatool include creating a list of papers since a particular year, creating a list of 10 most recent publications and managing multiple bibliographies. Problems include that output styles are limited and it may be slow to compile for many references.