Feature of the Week: Customizable Publication Exports

Many of you may already be using the export facilities for publication entries that BibSonomy offers; until recently, there were options to export your BibTeX as RSS, RDF, Endnote, or one particular plain HTML format.

Now we've revamped the export facilities by including the export layout engine from the great JabRef stand-alone BibTeX manager. Clicking on the more button next to the publication column header will take you to a list of publication output formats that are now available—right now there are 17! These include an RTF export for standard text processors such as Word, CSV which is easily imported to spreadsheets, as well as fancy HTML tables with sorting capabilities that you can integrate right into you web site.

Here are some examples:

• CSV for spreadsheets
• Fancy HTML table
  
• RTF for Word and other text processors
  
• DocBook XML

If there is still a layout missing that you need for your particular application, you can make your own! The JabRef documentation describes how custom export filters can be written using a special markup language. Once you've written your filter, you can upload three files: the piece of markup for formatting each entry, plus a custom header and footer; thus, you can get a complete, valid HTML page with your custom publication list out of BibSonomy which can directly be linked to without further processing. The URL scheme for these layouts is as follows: http://www.bibsonomy.org/layout/[filter]/[rest of BibSonomy URL] e.g. if I want to format my own publications of 2006 with the html filter: http://www.bibsonomy.org/layout/html/user/schmitz/myown+2006 See also Mark Schenk's page for some great examples of JabRef layouts.

Have fun!

Christoph

Feature of the Week: Integration of data from the DBLP server

The Digital Bibliography & Library Project (DBLP) is a collection of scientific publications in the field of computer science. DBLP supports listing more than 900,000 articles and is online available on http://dblp.uni-trier.de/. To ease the access of DBLP entries via BibSonomy, we imported about 700,000 references from the DBLP server. The publications are accessible via using the tag 'dblp' (http://www.bibsonomy.org/tag/dblp). In additon, an overview about the DBLP content is available on http://www.bibsonomy.org/user/dblp. After collecting DBLP entries, the user can export the collection in different formats like Endnote, RDF, RTF, BibTex, XML, HTML and RSS.

Have fun, Miranda

Feature of the week: Workover of DIN1505 export format

As most of knowledge workers know, a crucial issue when working with scientific references is how to properly format them when creating bibliographies or publication lists. There's so many possibilities - title first, author first, year in brackets, ... and many more. As Germans typically tend to define some standards and norms in such a case, since 1984 there exists the DIN-1505-2 norm (link in German only), which precisely defines a legible standard citation format.

Experienced BibSonomy users will notice that we're offering this export format since quite a while - but in fact, this was a rather simplified variant. Since our last release, our team member Hagen (thanks again!) meticulously examined the DIN-norm and implemented it as a JabRef export layout. If you want to see it in action, choose the "export button" on top of any publication list:

and choose "DIN 1505" (for the plain layout) or "DIN1505, grouped by year" (for a display grouped by year):

Here are two examples of the layout in action:

• http://www.bibsonomy.org/layout/din1505/user/dbenz/myown?items=1000
• http://www.bibsonomy.org/layout/din1505year/user/dbenz/myown?items=1000

For those of you who are technically interested: The export layout consists of "typical" JabRef layout template files, along with a number of custom formatters written in Java. Both are publicly available via our Maven repository. We would be happy to get some feedback, if this filter is useful to you! In any case happy tagging & exporting,

Dominik

Feature of the week: Citation Style Language export

During summer, there's typically many other great things to do besides writing publications - eating icecream, go swimming, relax during holidays... but despite that, we keep on giving you interesting little pointers to cool new BibSonomy features. Please don't stop eating ice cream or going to swim :) but keep it in the back of your head, for more productive seasons of the year ;)

This week's feature is the CSL export, which was added with release 2.0.25. CSL stands for Citation Style Language, which Wikipedia describes as an "open XML-based language to describe the formatting of citations and bibliographies". Basically you can think of it as a similar system to BibTeX - it definies a standard for representing bibliographic references, and another one for writing "templates", which transform those references into nicely formatted output. This standard is currently used by a number of platforms, including Zotero, Mendeley and Papers. Probably the nicest thing hereby is that there are quite large style repositories like https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles, which offer more than 2000 pre-defined styles for different user needs.


In order to allow you to make use of such great style collections, we're offering a new export format - you can retrieve you posts in a JSON-format, which is understood by current CSL processors. In other words, we're providing the input for you, such that you can just choose one of the existing CSL styles (or create a custom one) and create nicely formatted references according to your needs.


All you have to do is to append ?format=csl to any BibSonomy URL, and you'll see your post(s) in the corresponding format -  below is an example, produced by the URL http://www.bibsonomy.org/user/dbenz/myown+2012?format=csl. You'll surely recognize that it's a similar key-value representation compared to e.g. BibTeX. We hope this makes BibSonomy more versatile and useful for you particular purposes!


Happy Tagging,
  Dominik

{
    "603161eb4c5b2f87f3d3a50f87015337dbenz": {
        "DOI": "",
        "ISBN": "",
        "URL": "http://tist.acm.org/index.html",
        "abstract": "",
        "author": [
            {
                "family": "Strohmaier",
                "given": "Markus"
            },
            {
                "family": "Helic",
                "given": "Denis"
            },
            {
                "family": "Benz",
                "given": "Dominik"
            },
            {
                "family": "Körner",
                "given": "Christian"
            },
            {
                "family": "Kern",
                "given": "Roman"
            }
        ],
        "citation-label": "strohmaier2011evaluation",
        "collection-title": "",
        "container-title": "",
        "editor": [ ],
        "event-place": "",
        "id": "603161eb4c5b2f87f3d3a50f87015337dbenz",
        "issued": {
            "date-parts": [ ],
            "literal": "2012"
        },
        "note": "",
        "page": "",
        "publisher": "",
        "title": "Evaluation of Folksonomy Induction Algorithms",
        "volume": ""
    }

}

Feature of the Week: Choose the number of publications you want to export

BibSonomy offers many export formats (currently 46 formats, you can find a list of all export formats here) for your stored publications. Sometimes you only want to export the latest 5 or 10 publications and not the whole list. In the past you had to add a parameter to the url manually (e. g. by appending ?items=10) or manipulate the parameter to limit the number of publications. In the last release we have added buttons to our export pages to help you with this task.

On every BibSonomy page that lists publications you can get to the export page of the currently displayed publications by hovering over the options icon that you will find on the top right of the list.

In the appearing menu the link labeled "more" takes you to the export page:

On the export page you can now use the radio buttons (red box) to set the number of publications you want to export (e. g. 10 publications). You can choose between 5, 10, 20, 50, 100 and 1000 publications:

After choosing the number of publications you can select the export format from the drop down list above or the links below.

I hope this new feature makes it easier to export publications from BibSonomy.

Happy exporting and tagging!
Daniel