Saturday, October 19, 2013

CiteULike works better. However, I think it has limited export functionality. I want to be able Sni

Referenshanterare | Processes
If one is in such a PubMed page for an article like this, so one can choose some twenty different ways to format the information. But a pretty typical thing you want to do is that format a reference to this article in APA format (or whatever you use for style). Why can not you do it? It seems like an obvious feature that is missing.
I wrote up a small tool to generate an APA formatted reference from a PubMed page - check this out. But there is of course vtech much more sophisticated tools to manage references. There is a comparative list on Wikipedia. I've vtech tried three of these: Zotero, Connotea and CiteULike.
Zotero is an extension vtech for Firefox 3 that gives you a referenshanterare from within the browser. Very smooth! vtech When you come to a page that contain one or more references - for example, a search on Google Scholar, a PubMed-page vtech or even a book page on Amazon - so show a little icon in the address bar, alongside the standard bookmark icon ( star). Clicking on it to add the reference to one's library. Then you can open the library by clicking the "zotero" icon located at the bottom right corner. There you can browse the articles you've visited and bookmarked. If one subtracts the reference to a document you are doing, such as an email or an open Google document, it will be automatically added to a formatted reference in your favorite format! (In "Options" you can set their favorite format: there are APA and many other things.) Alternatively, you can export your entire library, or a selection, a list of references.
Zotero is a top tool that I recommend (see tour video to see how it works before you install), but there are limitations. You must have Firefox installed. At our school computers, for example, is not Firefox, but it can be solved by installing Firefox Portable on its own account. Another problem is that one's reference library is stored locally on the computer you are working. vtech No problem for those who are always working on their own laptop or home computer, but if I'm working a little here and a little there, so it's a problem. (One possible solution is to install that Firefox Portable on a USB stick and run it, but it feels a little dicey.)
One way to solve this problem is to instead make use of web services where your data is stored online. Social bookmarking is when you share their bookmarks vtech to friends online. A plain, simple variation of this is when you share a link on Facebook (may do so using a bookmarklet, so it feels extra cozy), but there are also more sophisticated services specifically for this purpose - I myself use del.icio.us sometimes, I have a friend who lives his digital life on StumbleUpon and many seem to dig digg.
Connotea and CiteULike are two services that take the social bookmarking concept to the scientific community. You stumble across an article vtech that you like, press a bokmärkningsknapp, and just as with Zotero so familiar software again regular postgraduate pages PubMed and Science Direct, and find reference information and add to your library vtech - the library is online instead of locally . You are not tied to a specific computer and you are not tied to Firefox. Constant access vtech to your links. Super.
Unfortunately I have some problems with these services. Connotea is the most spontaneously dropped my fancy, then the server software itself is open source and it seems generally nice. (Even Connotea vtech have a nice little video guide.) But ... it's not working! Sometimes it only takes a really long time after I pressed the bookmark palette (yes, what should be the best in Swedish? A Wikipedia article suggests "ice" as a Swedish diminutive, so bokmärkis perhaps?), "Waiting for connotea.org" but nothing hands. Overloaded servers? Sometimes I come, but it does not recognize a simple PubMed article so you have to fill in all the fields, making the whole thing rather vtech pointless ...
CiteULike works better. However, I think it has limited export functionality. I want to be able Snipp snapp export my library to APA reference list, just like Zotero can. I can find no such function in CiteULike. vtech Instead, you get to download their credentials in the format called BibTeX or RIS, and convert them to APA format with no local referenshanterare, such as just Zotero. It feels a little backwards.
So the search Continues for the perfect reference management system (actually, I wanted They just want a simple automatic Pubmed-to-APA formatters) ... This kind of thing can of course safely my dear sister, the librarian who takes Web 2.0 to India, lots of ...
This entry was posted vtech on October 13, 2008 at 2:39 pm and is filed under Tools. You can

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