Opinions expressed here are my own, and do not represent the views of my employer.
Contact me at firstname.lastname at gmail
or at twitter: @mikemccracken
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BibDesk: The Free BibTeX-based reference manager and PDF library for the Mac intosh
A nice writeup of using BibDesk with Subversion:
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p>BibDesk, BibTeX and Subversion – An academic’s necessity:
I decided I’d choose based on 1) open formats, 2) documentation, and an 3) open development model (open source). After looking through RefWorks, vanilla BibTeX files, ProCite, EndNote, Reference Manager (the application) and BibDesk, I chose BibDesk.
If you use BibDesk, I want to hear how you use it – what features you use most, and how you have it set up.
I’ve added a page to the BibDesk wiki to share User Screenshots – add a section there about what you do with BibDesk, and share your experiences. I added my own thoughts already, to get things started.
(Note, image uploading on the wiki is broken right now, I’ll fix it as soon as I can and update this post. Please add text anyway!)
This is about building an iTunes store-style interface to the web’s bibliographic information.
I’ve been pushing along the hCite Microformat process, which will set a standard for HTML publishers to add simple semantic markup to their pages that programs like BibDesk can read as citation metadata.
In stark contrast to great but complex things like Z39.50, if you can publish a web page, you can serve citation metadata. No need to have servers to support complicated queries, let google do the hard work.
The progress on the standard has been slow, and so far there is only one beta implementation to help focus the talks – Brian Suda’s X2C XSL stylesheet.
In the spirit of building momentum, I’ve added support for parsing hCite to a private build of BibDesk. For now, we’re just discussing how to merge it, but soon the feature will show up in nightly builds, and anyone can start testing and getting experience with the emerging standard. I’ll update when it’s available, but until then, here’s a rough screenshot:
Update: this feature is now in the latest nightly builds, but it’s hidden because hCite isn’t final. To see the web group, type defaults write edu.ucsd.cs.mmccrack.bibdesk BDSKShouldShowWebGroup true (all one line) at the command line before running a recent nightly.
I love reading about how people use BibDesk. Over on the bibdesk-users mailing list, James Howison explains in detail how Alex Montgomery’s OpenURL script is making him happy. The short version: “Zero typing of the bibliographic details :)”
As he explains, you can find some great scripts for BibDesk on the wiki at BibDesk Applescripts.
BibDesk 1.3 was just released (see here for very complete release notes), and this release adds a few features that were requested four years ago – searching PubMed and libraries with Z39.50 support. If you use those resources, this means no more downloading files to import references – just search from within BibDesk, and your results show up as a group that you can browse and through with the same interface you use for your local references.
Other notable features include using URLs or scripts as sources for external groups – if you have a script that can generate data BibDesk can read, its output can show up as a group.
Two new data formats are now supported for importing – MARC (and some MARC XML) and Refer. Dublin Core XML is also supported.
Note that this is also the first version that will no longer launch on Mac OS X 10.3.9.
Kudos to everyone involved – check out the contributors wiki page for who to thank!
For my first contribution to BibDesk in a while, I’ve added the ability to read Dublin Core metadata when it is encoded in HTML META tags on a web page.
What this means is that when using the “New Publications from Web” feature, some sites you browse to will have the publication’s information filled in for you, so you don’t have to type anything at all. The Eprints.org open archive software does this, so check out their list of archives for examples to test it out on.
It’ll be in the next version, which isn’t scheduled yet, so if you’d like to try it out sooner, see the nightly builds page and heed its warnings.
If you publish web sites with one-page-per-pubcation and want info about embedding DC terms in your meta tags, see the Dublin Core recommendation.
If you want to support AutoFill for a site that doesn’t have one page per publication, or would like to provide more metadata, I suggest waiting for the citation microformat. Feel free to ask why…
Update: I made a 12-second movie of how it works – BibDesk, EPrints and Dublin Core