Friday, November 7, 2008

Oooookay, new idea

Like I said, this is a work in progress. I have access to about 10 reference managers that have varying levels of easy of use and access. Most require other people to have accounts, and those accounts are usually not free. It they are free, and usually require signing up and futsing with logins. I thought I would use Connotea because it is open to the public, but adding references is dog slow and pops up a new windows for each one (which is doesn't automatically close).Pain - in - the - patoot. The devish scheme now?

Greasemonkey and CiteULike. Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension that allows users to create little bits of Javascript code to do their bidding. There happens to be one particular script to add a PubMed page link directly to CiteULike, which is free, open, and requires no logins... AND has custom RSS feeds. Yeah. You'll be able to subscribe to the DNI paper feed.

That got me thinking that you could do that already if I just labeled the papers instead of starring them in Google Reader (then I just share the label). But, then there would be no simple, easy to read summary to post.

And in the end, I decided that I need to consider the options a little better before going all out for one of these. In other words, SPF is going to be delayed a little longer (but I promise to post it before Sf'nN)!

Any suggestions are always welcome, too!

2 comments:

Remy Wahnoun said...

What about sharing an endnote file?
Then we could see the abstracts?
An idea i had some time ago was to have a semi-open ftp server, where others can also add files etc...
Again, thanks for SPF and DNE
Remy

Brandon King said...

Yeah, I was thinking of also serving up an EndNote or RIS file, which would be easy enough by taking advantage of one of the dozen or so free file hosting sites. The only problem with doing just that is that folks without EndNote get no love. And it can be annoying to require opening EndNote just to see if there are a paper or two you're interested in.

--5 minutes later--

Hrm, nevermind. I just threw together an EndNote bibliography format to export with the url formatted. I think I'll give this a try. One of my concerns is that EN doesn't always work correctly when you export the citation directly from a journal. Sometimes the whole abstract isn't exported, sometimes bits are missing, etc.

I'm going to mess with this a little more to make it work with my workflow. Exporting from PubMed directly doesn't include the URL info, which is stupid. Hrm, maybe try the LabMeeting ff add on...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9270

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