Posts Tagged: bibdesk

Hacks / Noticed / Research / Software — 1 Comment
20
Feb 09

BibTex and Word Documents

Via Academic Productivity, I’ve been looking for this forever:

BibTex4Word is an add-in for Microsoft Word that allows the citation of references from a BibTex database. BibTex4Word will insert a bibliography into your document using your choice formatting style.

It is intended for three types of user:

1. LateX users who need to use Microsoft Word. BibTex4Word allows you to use your existing BibTex database and favourite bibliography style.

2. Word users who can’t afford a commercial bibliography package but need to insert citations and bibliographies into their documents. Everything you need to manage references is available free.

3. Word users who have a commercial bibliography package but who don’t like it. BibTex4Word is lightweight, transparent and doesn’t mess up your documents. It is also free.

I’m completely married to Bibdesk as my reference manager, but the lack of Word integration has always caused headaches.  I’m very excited to have found an answer.

Noticed / Research / Software — No Comments
28
Jan 09

Steven Johnson on Research and Writing

Erik Marshall points to an essay by Steven Johnson on his research and writing techniques.  Steven is a brilliant writer; it is interesting and humanizing to see the extent to which he uses technology.  I use BibDesk is a manner similar to how Johnson uses Devonthink, but I think I would benefit from the more unstructured approach in Devonthink.  Any readers use it?

The first stage, which is crucial, is a completely disorganized capture of every little snippet of text that seems vaguely interesting. I grab paragraphs from web pages, from digital books, and transcribe pages from printed text — and each little snippet I just drop into Devonthink with no organization other than a citation of where it came from. This goes on for months and months; I read in a completely unplanned and exploratory way (increasingly online, thanks to Google Books and other sources) and just drag anything that seems at all interesting into Devonthink.

….in the last stage before I actually start writing, I create a little folder in Devonthink for each of the chapters. And then I sit down and read through every single little snippet that I’ve uncovered over the past year or so of research. And as I’m reading them on the screen, I just drag them into the chapter folder where I think they will be most useful. Some snippets get dragged to multiple folders; most don’t make it into any folder. But I read through them all, and in reading through them all, I have a completely new contextual experience of them, because I’m at the end of the research cycle, not at the beginning. They feel like pieces of a puzzle that’s coming together, instead of hints or hunches.

Read the full article: DIY: How to write a book – Boing Boing.

Hacks — 9 Comments
19
Mar 08

Practical Unit Structures: BibDesk Importing and Templates

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been organizing my citations in preparation for proposal writing. I’m really terrible at the citation-management process; I just let pdf’s pile up in folders on my desktop, putting them into a citation manager every few months. The reason I put this off is the process is so tedious – hand-entering citations is about the last thing I ever want to do.

Today I’m going to share some tips that may make your citation-management process less painful. If you’re a grizzled academic you probably know all this stuff, but fellow grad students may benefit from this. First and foremost, I use BibDesk as my citation manager. BibDesk is for the Mac, it is free, and it is one of the best pieces of academic software I’ve ever encountered. I highly recommend it if you’re looking for a citation manager.

The first bit of advice is with regards to the citation-import process. This is fairly general advice and not specific to BibDesk. If you’re tired of hand-entering citations, many times publishers will provide downloadable citations from their websites. For example, if one of your papers is hosted by Sage, Sage’s site will allow you to download a citation directly into your citation manager. Generally these sites will provide the citations in various formats; the good news is that BibDesk will import almost anything. As an example, here’s a link to a paper. To download the citation, simply click on the “Download to citation manager” button and you’re set.

Different publishers have different approaches and techniques, so you’ll have to sift through the sites to find the option for downloadable citations. ScienceDirect is particularly stupid, requiring you to be logged in to download citations. Other sites spit out invalid files, so you’ll have to touch some stuff up by hand. Its somewhat incredible to think that publishers haven’t got citation exporting right, but I’ve learned not to be surprised by academic publishing.

Now, if you can’t find citation exporting on the publishers site, the academic search engines Google Scholar and Microsoft’s Live Academic provide downloadable citations. To turn on citation downloads in Google scholar, open the preferences and select “Show links to import citations into [your bibliography manager].” A link will appear next to all search results allowing you to export the citation directly into your citation manager. Beware, however – the results are often incomplete, incorrect or referring outdated versions of the paper. However, I’ve saved more time than I’ve lost with Google Scholar, so it might be useful to you as well.

The previous tips will work with any citation manager; my next tips are BibDesk-specific. BibDesk is built for integration with LaTeX, which works fine for some of my papers (but not all). Sometimes I just need to export a list of APA citations which I tack onto the end of Word file. Unfortunately BibDesk makes this difficult by default. To solve this problem, you need to use Templates.

With export templates, you can define a custom format for exporting citations that can be included in a document. Unfortunately, there’s no built-in for exporting to APA (or any other format that might be useful). I was able to find some APA-like examples, but none that fit APA exactly. So I went and hacked on a template, and now I’ll share it here. Linked here are two templates, that you can import into BibDesk. The first is APAInlineTemplate.txt, which will generate the (Lastname, year) inline citations you can include in your document. The second is APAFullCiteTemplate.txt, which will generate full citations to include at the end of the document. Download them both as a zip file here.

To install these in BibDesk, open up Preferences->Templates, and then click the plus button. To install, give them names (“APA Inline Citation” and “APA Full Citation” work for me), then select the files (you’ll first want to move them to ~/Library/Application Support/BibDesk/Templates). Use txt as the type. Once you’ve got them installed, right click on citation in BibDesk, select the “Copy Using Template” dialogue, and then select an APA style. You’ll now be able to copy APA-standard citations directly out of BibDesk for inclusion into your document.

I should also note that I am only responsible for hacking these templates – I believe I downloaded the originals from the BibDesk site and modified them. I’ve added conditionals to make them more forgiving (say, you don’t have the Address of the publisher) but there may be weirdness if you’ve got funky data. And the template doesn’t address every style of publication – but it covered most of what I had in my library. To find out more about templates, read the BibDesk wiki page here, and here’s a link to the manual.

This stuff is pretty dense – it took me a while to figure it out, but I’m glad I spent the time. BibDesk is now much more useful to me, and I hope I’ve saved some time for you as well.

Software — No Comments
30
Jul 06

Bib and Microformat Citations

There’s a discussion emerging on the microformats-discuss list concerning a microformat citation standard. I believe a citation microformat could be incredibly valuable – it would give us a standards-based way to share and ingest web citations. As someone who uses Bibdesk rather than Refworks, I am really in need of such a Microformat.

The discussion is very early, but I’ve offered up the .bib citation format as a fine semantic to base the microformat citation standard upon. The .bib citation format is a flexible, open, and widely used bibliographic format. It is the LaTeX reference manager, but it is widely used and adopted by many reference-management applications (Including the glorious Bibdesk, Refworks) and software applications (OpenOffice, LaTeX).

I believe its very important that we get a microformats citation standard right – there’s so much existing software that supports existing standards, and we don’t want to lose out on that. So I’m waving my hands, asking people to hop in and support .bib as the format on which to base the citation microformat. The microformats community prides itself on not reinventing wheels, and leveraging existing standards – so I’m fairly sure they’ll see the value in bib. However, if you’d like to add your support for using bib as the microformat citation format, jump in the thread and contribute.

Thoughts — 1 Comment
12
Apr 06

The Evolution of Academic Search

Microsoft has announced an academic search product, academic.live.com, and I’m impressed. Blending elements of Google Scholar and CiteSeer, the Live Academic search seems to address the things students want, but currently lack in Google Scholar. These include:

  • Downloadable citation (Endnote and BibTex – they get major points for BibTex)
  • Ability to screen the search to only open access journals.
  • Ability to sort results by Relevance, Date, Author, Journal and Conference.
  • Structured abstracts.

I believe a lot of students will find these features very useful. As reported on Techcrunch, Live Academic only supports the sciences, but they plan to add subject areas as development continues.

The simple fact is academic search is being decentralized from the institution. Tools like Google Scholar, CiteSeer, Live Academic and the indispensable CiteULike are giving students new options for approaching academic content. We know the woeful state of publisher-maintained databases, so is it really any surprise that the market is reacting? By creating such a strong offering, Microsoft has realized the market space available in the academic search field. In offering students a full-featured, high quality product, I feel there’s significant audience that can be taken from Google Scholar (which truly has the feel of a 20% project, as opposed to an area in which Google is significantly investing).

When professors and librarians complain that students only use the web for research, they are missing the point. Students want academic content, and a great number of students want the best academic content. But searching across 15 library databases that look and feel like they were designed in 1995 just doesn’t fit the model of search our students are comfortable with. Microsoft has seen an area of opportunity, and is giving tools to an underserved population. Google and the various LIS vendors are now playing catch-up to Microsoft.

Postscript: What decentralized (i.e. not tied to your library) services do you use for academic purposes? I talked about a few I use (Scholar, CiteULike, Citeseer), but I wonder if there are any others out there that I’m missing. I’m not really talking open archives and federated repositories, but things more along the lines of consumer tools that students could really embrace.