More Thoughts on Referencer

[Carlos Moffat]

Hi,

I've been trying referencer (1.0.2 is now available in Debian/Sid). It's
really great. I have a few comments/feature requests. I should clarify
I'm mostly interested in using referencer to export to a bibtex file for
use into LaTeX:

1) Although DOI lookup is really great, many papers are not available
that way. These days I'm using google scholar and its 'Import into
BibTex' feature to copy and paste into pybliographer. Problem is,
referencer doesn't seem to have a way to copy 'native' bibtex code into
the database. This would be greatly appreciated. Of course, a direct
query and import using Google Scholar would be just fantastic.

2) Although I like the icon view, is not very useful as it only displays
the key. Any way extra info could be displayed, maybe when hovering with
the mouse over the file, clicking on it, or something?

3) I haven't checked very carefully, but some of the DOI lookups give
the wrong results. For example 10.1002/joc.798 gives the right
title/journal/year but only lists one author (it has three).

Cheers,
Carlos

[John Spray]

Post by Carlos Moffat
1) Although DOI lookup is really great, many papers are not available
that way. These days I'm using google scholar and its 'Import into
BibTex' feature to copy and paste into pybliographer. Problem is,
referencer doesn't seem to have a way to copy 'native' bibtex code into
the database. This would be greatly appreciated. Of course, a direct
query and import using Google Scholar would be just fantastic.

Bibtex pasting shouldn't be too difficult, and is a likely candidate for
a new feature in the next release. Interfacing with google scholar
would be interesting, although I'm not aware of google providing a
public API for this kind of thing.

Post by Carlos Moffat
2) Although I like the icon view, is not very useful as it only displays
the key. Any way extra info could be displayed, maybe when hovering with
the mouse over the file, clicking on it, or something?

The GtkIconView used for this is quite limited, and tends to become quite problematic when displaying anything more than short strings. Displaying extra information as a tooltip is a good idea, I will look into it.

Post by Carlos Moffat
3) I haven't checked very carefully, but some of the DOI lookups give
the wrong results. For example 10.1002/joc.798 gives the right
title/journal/year but only lists one author (it has three).

The single-author problem is related to the way crossref.org supply the metadata -- the files they provide actually only include one author. This would be fixed in the future with a switch to the OAI-PMH protocol for metadata harvesting. When that happens more databases will be supported as well. Implementing solid OAI-PMH support will take a bit of time.

Thanks for the feedback,
John

[Carlos Moffat]

Post by John Spray

Post by Carlos Moffat
1) Although DOI lookup is really great, many papers are not available
that way. These days I'm using google scholar and its 'Import into
BibTex' feature to copy and paste into pybliographer. Problem is,
referencer doesn't seem to have a way to copy 'native' bibtex code into
the database. This would be greatly appreciated. Of course, a direct
query and import using Google Scholar would be just fantastic.

Bibtex pasting shouldn't be too difficult, and is a likely candidate for
a new feature in the next release. Interfacing with google scholar
would be interesting, although I'm not aware of google providing a
public API for this kind of thing.

Post by Carlos Moffat
2) Although I like the icon view, is not very useful as it only displays
the key. Any way extra info could be displayed, maybe when hovering with
the mouse over the file, clicking on it, or something?

The GtkIconView used for this is quite limited, and tends to become quite problematic when displaying anything more than short strings. Displaying extra information as a tooltip is a good idea, I will look into it.

Post by Carlos Moffat
3) I haven't checked very carefully, but some of the DOI lookups give
the wrong results. For example 10.1002/joc.798 gives the right
title/journal/year but only lists one author (it has three).

The single-author problem is related to the way crossref.org supply the metadata -- the files they provide actually only include one author. This would be fixed in the future with a switch to the OAI-PMH protocol for metadata harvesting. When that happens more databases will be supported as well. Implementing solid OAI-PMH support will take a bit of time.
Thanks for the feedback,
John

Sounds great.

Cheers,
Carlos