(Classic) Feature of the week: Posting Publications

Hi everybody!

As we allow ourself a short rest from BibSonomy's strict monthly release cycle, the next few blog posts here will cover some of BibSonomy's basic features. We start this series of "classic" features with describing the process of entering publications into BibSonomy.

Most of BibSonomy's users are using the bookmarklet buttons which allow to automatically extract all necessary meta data from the browser's window. Nevertheless, BibSonomy offers several ways to enter relevant information for a given publication. Today I'll describe the most basic one - namely manual data entry of all required fields.
By navigating to "post publication" in BibSonomy's menu,the input form for entering publication meta information is shown:

We know that entering publication meta information is a tedious work and we try our best to reduce the required steps for successfully filling out all fields. During the manual data entry process, the most valuable support is given by a full-text-search based autocompletion. If you partially enter the title of a publication which is already known to BibSonomy, you can select the corresponding entry from a list of recommendations. All available form fields will be copied and it remains for you to provide the set of appropriate tags:

Stay tuned and happy tagging!

.folke

(Classic) Feature of the week: Posting Publications as snippet

Hello everyone,

this week we learn how to post a publication using a snippet. This is a very comfortable way to post a publication. Just click on post publication and choose the tab snippet.

We can paste one or multiple snippets into the BibTeX/EndNote snippet* box. The visibility of our post is controlled with the viewable for field.

Basically, that is all we have to do. But our snippet importer offers some additional goodies. We can choose to edit before import or to overwrite an existing one.

The best part is the tag capability of BibSonomy. Many snippets already have keyword or tag field as in the following example:

We can use these tags for our import. Since there is no standard for tags and their delimeters, we have to tell BibSonomy our format. Therefore, we have to select the type of tag delimiter from the corresponding drop down menu. We can choose between:

• ' ' (whitespace),
• , (somma), and
  
  
• ; (semicolon).

We have to set a whitespace substitute sign if we do not use whitespaces as tag telimiter. A '_' is used otherwise. To specifiy our own one, just klick into the text field and remove the underscore and replace it with our own sign.



After we click on the post button appears the next dialog:



It is just a confirmation dialog to be sure that our tags get imported correctly. If everything is fine, we can click on the update button to finish the import.



That is it for this week. Stay tuned and happy tagging!



Jürgen