mala::home Davide “+mala” Eynard’s website

Bibsonomy

As you probably have noticed yet just by giving a look at my About page, I'm using Bibsonomy as an online tool to manage bibliographies for my (erm... future?) papers. If you use BibTeX (or EndNote) for your bibliographies this is quite a useful tool. With it you can:

• Save references to the papers/websites you have read all in one place
• Save all the bibliography-related information in a standard, widely used format
• Tag publications: this doesn't only mean you can easily find them later, but also that you can share them with others, find new ones, find new people interested in the same stuff and so on (soon: an article about tags and folksonomies, I promise)
• Easily export publication lists in BibTeX format, ready to include in your papers

This export feature is particularly useful: you can manage your bibliographies directly on the website and then export them (or a part of them) in few clicks. Even better: you can do that even without clicking at all! Try this:

wget "http://www.bibsonomy.org/bib/user/deynard?items=100" -O bibs.bib

You've just downloaded my whole collection inside one "bibs.bib" file, ready to be included in your LaTeX document. The items parameter allows you to specify how many publications you want to download: yes, it sounds silly (why would you want only the first n items?)
Of course, if you like you can just download items tagged as "tagging" with this URL:

http://www.bibsonomy.org/bib/user/deynard/tagging

You can join tags like in this URL:

http://www.bibsonomy.org/bib/user/deynard/tagging+ontology

And of course, you can substitute wget with lynx:

lynx -dont_wrap_pre -dump "http://www.bibsonomy.org/bib/user/deynard?items=100" > bibs2.bib

Well, that's all for now. If you happen to find any interesting hacks lemme know ;)