Use this to get a count of the number of unique references cited in one or more LyX documents. Especially useful when you have a parent-child document structure and are interested in per-chapter statistics.
There are two flavours of the program: one written in Bash and the other in
Python. Use whichever is supported in your computing environment; both are
equally short pieces of code. The shell script requires Bash 4.x, sed and
dos2unix. The interpreted program is compatible with both Python 2 and 3.
You may want to rename or symlink either of the scripts to remove the file extension for convenience of use. Usage is straightforward:
~$ lyxcitecount *.lyx
251
~$ lyxcitecount Chapter1.lyx Chapter2.lyx
77
I encourage anyone to try and integrate something like this into the LyX statistics dialog. Should work with any and all citation styles since LyX wraps a single cite command, but please do report back if it doesn't.