Bibliography Parser — PDF to .bib

LIBRARY-FIRST RULE: ALWAYS check Paperpile membership by DOI (paperpile lookup-by-doi) for each parsed reference BEFORE generating new BibTeX entries. Topic/title search-library is a lossy discovery aid, NOT a membership test — never tag a reference NEW off a title-search miss. Reuse existing library entries instead of constructing from scratch. Enforced in Phase 2.3 per shared/reference-resolution.md § Membership Check.

Goal: given a PDF file, extract all cited references and produce a clean, validated .bib file.

When to Use

• You have a PDF (paper, report, thesis) and need a .bib file for its references
• Importing references from a paper that doesn't have a companion .bib file
• Reconstructing a bibliography from a document with embedded \begin{thebibliography} or numbered references
• Converting a reference list from any format into BibTeX

When NOT to Use

• You already have a .bib file and just need to validate it — use the configured bibliography validator
• Finding new references on a topic — use an installed literature workflow or scholarly search
• The PDF is already in Paperpile — export via paperpile export-bib instead (faster, more accurate)