[Air-l] Citation Managers - Alternatives to Endnote/CiteULike/... ?

[Joseph Reagle]

On Sunday 19 March 2006 12:10, Axel Bruns wrote:
> I'm wondering if any of you can suggest useful alternatives to research
> citation manager tools such as Endnote or CiteULike. My approach to 
research
> is to store key quotations from a source alongside the bibliographic
> reference, but none of the standard tools I have come across seem to do 
this
> particularly effectively 


This is why I created my own tool:

http://reagle.org/joseph/blog/technology/python/freemind-extract-0.5
[[
2005 Jun 10 | Mindmapping Bibliographies

   I am releasing a new zipfile of the fe mindmapping bibliographic
   tools. As explained in Extracting Bibliographies from Freemind, these
   are python scripts that are able to convert between Freemind mindmaps
   (using a few simple conventions) and bibliographic formats (i.e.,
   OO.org CSV and bibtex). This approach is preferable to other
   bibliographic tools with limited/constrained forms for text entry.
   With fe one has a complete outline/map of texts, with figures, images,
   tables, links to sites, etc.; one can easily organize texts by topic
   or in separate mindmap files; and one can generate queries where each
   matching line has its appropriate citation with year and page number
   (e.g., "Giddens"). Unlike many bibliographic tools, it does not query
   on-line databases, but one can use such tools (e.g., tellico or
   refworks) to query and generate bibtex bibliographies and then use
   be.py to convert them to a mindmap.
     * fe.py: extract bibliographic data from bibliographic MM (dependent
       on XML ElementTree and optionally bibtex2html)
          + this version is faster since it uses XML ElementTree instead
            of XML Tramp.
          + given a list of authors cited (*.rl, such as that generated
            by pe.py or pyblink) bibtex2html will generate a bibliography
            of only those authors.
          + bibliographic maps are searchable from the command-line or
            via the Web (e.g., search results for "Giddens" in my mindmap
            [java|flash]).
          + a Web of mindmaps can be searched for essential entries (the
            title is bold) and placed in a new mindmap for studying.

     fe.py -h (help)
     -v (output csv)
     -c (chase links between MMs)
     -w (output bibtex & html file) -a (include abstracts) -s (use
     bibtex style)
     -q (query)
     -e (create new MM of essential works)
     * be.py: extract a MM from a bibtex file (dependent on bibstuff)
     * de.py: extract a MM from a dictated text file
     * ff.py: fix the case of titles of a bibliographic MM
     * pe.py: extract the bibliographic keys of the form 'Snide and Smith
       (2003)' or '(Snide, Smith and Smittie 2004)' from natural language
       text
     * te.py: parse inconsistently formatted textual bibliographies into
       bibliographic MM (e.g., from syllabi, cb2Bib is cool too)
]]

-- 
Regards,          http://www.mit.edu/~reagle/
Joseph Reagle     E0 D5 B2 05 B6 12 DA 65  BE 4D E3 C1 6A 66 25 4E