Frequently Asked Questions

General

Is my data sent anywhere?

No. BibexPy runs entirely on your machine; your licensed exports never leave it. Outbound requests happen only when you run enrichment (to the providers you configured) or optional LLM-assisted harmonization — and those send metadata queries (DOIs, names), not your dataset.

Is it free?

Yes — open source under GPL-3.0-or-later. The Scopus enrichment source needs your own (institutional) API key; everything else works without paid services.

Which databases are supported?

Web of Science (plain-text export) and Scopus (CSV export) as inputs; previously prepared Excel files also load. Additional databases are on the roadmap.

Merging

How accurate is Smart Merge?

Exact DOI/identifier matches are deterministic. For records without shared identifiers, Jaro–Winkler title similarity with blocking is applied, and anything below the high-confidence threshold routes to the review queue instead of merging silently. You control the final corpus.

Two different papers were suggested as duplicates — what do I do?

Reject the pair in the Uncertain Pairs panel. Rejections are remembered and logged.

Harmonization

Does disambiguation use machine learning?

Core decisions use ORCID evidence and string/context similarity — deterministic and repeatable. An optional LLM can suggest resolutions for borderline cases, but nothing is applied without your approval, and a snapshot precedes every apply.

Which LLM providers work?

Any OpenAI-compatible endpoint (DeepSeek, OpenAI, OpenRouter or a custom base URL), configured in Settings. The LLM is entirely optional.

Data & operations

Can I undo an operation?

Yes — restore the automatic pre-operation snapshot from the audit log. The restore is logged too.

Where is everything stored?

~/.bibexpy/storage (projects) and ~/.bibexpy/.env (settings). Plain folders and files — easy to back up.

Can multiple people use one installation?

BibexPy is single-user by design (it binds to localhost). For teams, each researcher runs their own instance; projects can be shared by copying the project folder.

Citing

How do I cite BibexPy?

See How to Cite — APA and BibTeX provided.