Re: Full paper-to-bibliography toolchain
On Sat, 2009-03-14 at 21:41 -0500, Bryan Bishop wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> This email comes about because of the recent thread about bibliography
> management. In particular, I've always had my eye out for what sort of
> software should (or should not) exist for scientific papers. Some
> immediate examples:
>
[snip]
>
> So to clear up the rambling I've written above, here's some issues:
> (1) downloading PDFs and getting the bibliographical information easily
> (2) keeping track of what I have and have not read
> (3) keeping track of literature searching and paper-reading
> (4) scheduling "papers to be written deadlines" re: CFPs, managing
> large volumes of CFPs
> (5) somehow integrating the "bibtools" package into all of this
> (6) and also somehow integrating emacs' "org-mode"
>
> I feel that the present lack of system is somewhat broken, and I'd
> like to help build a toolchain, but I'd also like to see if any of
> these problems strike a chord with any other d-s people. Thoughts?
This sounds worthwhile to me; I've been aware of various online sources
for references but haven't integrated them into my workflow. One reason
is that I don't know what tools are available; it sounds as if a package
like this could help.
A few comments:
tellico (packaged for Debian) might be useful here. Although it is a
general purpose collection manager, a lot of effort has gone into
bibliography management and online retrieval.
This task bleeds into the general one of writing papers. Since there
are a lot of ways to write papers, and since different tools have
different facilities for integrating citations, this could introduce a
lot of diversity into this task.
Similarly, there are a lot of online resources that could be integrated
with. medline and the science or social science citation index are some
examples.
There are also a lot of ways to get to those online sources. In my
case, I need to go to web vpn interface for our library, and access
online sources through there (this is to get access to material that the
university had to pay for). I'm not sure if a generic VPN client would
do. My public library has a similar setup, though it doesn't require
VPN. It would be nice if there were tools that helped with this,
although I wouldn't really expect general solutions to be possible.
Ross Boylan
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