How to implement a Python tool for automated academic citation and reference management?

Implementing an automated citation and reference management tool in Python involves several steps. We will use some special libraries like PyCite and Beautiful Soup. Before we move towards the step-by-step process, make sure Python and pip are already installed on your system.

Here is a step by step guide on how to proceed with the fundamental parts:

Step 1: Installing the Necessary Libraries

First, you need to install all the necessary libraries. You can install them using pip.

pip install PyCite
pip install beautifulsoup4
pip install requests

Step 2: Creating a Python File

Second, create a new Python (.py) file to write your scripts.

Step 3: Importing Libraries

In the Python file, import the necessary Python libraries.

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests

Step 4: Fetching Data from Website

Use Beautiful Soup and requests to fetch data from the website.

# URL of the page you want to extract
url = 'your-academic-paper-url'
# Send a HTTP request to the URL
response = requests.get(url)
# Parse the HTML content
content = BeautifulSoup(response.content, 'html.parser')

Step 5: Finding the Relevant Information

Find the part of the HTML that contains the reference list or citations.

# Find the references part of the HTML
references = content.find('div', {'id': 'references'})

Step 6: Extracting the References

For each reference, extract the necessary metadata (title, authors, year, venue, etc.).

# List to hold all the references
ref_list = []
# Extract details from each reference
for ref in references.find_all('li'):
    ref_details = {}
    ref_details['title'] = ref.find('span', {'class': 'title'}).text
    ref_details['authors'] = ref.find('span', {'class': 'authors'}).text
    ref_details['year'] = ref.find('span', {'class': 'year'}).text
    ref_details['venue'] = ref.find('span', {'class': 'venue'}).text
    ref_list.append(ref_details)

Step 7: Generating Citations

Once you have a list of references with their metadata, you can generate citations for each one using PyCite.

from pycite import Citation, bibliography
# Generate citations
citations = [Citation(**ref) for ref in ref_list]

Step 8: Creating the Reference List

Finally, generate the reference list using the bibliography function from PyCite.

# Generate bibliography
biblio = bibliography(citations)
# Display the bibliography in HTML format
html_biblio = biblio.to_html()

Step 9: Saving the bibliography to an HTML file

You could save your bibliography to an HTML file.

with open('bibliography.html', 'w') as file:
    file.write(html_biblio)

In the above steps, the tool was built on the assumption that the references are in a specific HTML format. This may vary across different academic websites. Hence, you need to adjust your web scraping logic according to the website's structure you are targeting.

This is just a very basic version of what a citation and reference management tool could look like in Python. A fully-fledged tool could have features like GUI interface, database management, citation styles, PDF uploader and parser, DOI fetcher, and much more.