Feature of the Week: Improved Metadata Management

Providing good publication metadata helps locating specific resources, discovering new relevant literature, and increasing publicity of the referenced resources. However, providing correct and complete metadata is a tedious task which needs knowledge of required fields, correct abbreviations and optional information.

The BibSonomy user interface for editing a publication's specific BibTeX metadata aims to support you in your metadata creation process. Recently, the interface was improved by adding new javascript functionality: when you enter a publication, only the required and optional fields corresponding to the publication type are shown.

For instance, if you select the reference type book, title, authors and year are marked in blue as required fields. Additionally, editors, the booktitle, volume, number, publisher, address, month, edition, url, note, series and abstract are shown. Fields such as pages or journal are hidden. In case that your BibTeX entry has text in fields that are neither required nor optional, the field is shown just the same instead of being ignored. This prevents you from loosing metadata because of mistaking the correct fields of a reference type.

BibSonomy's metadata fields refer to the specifications in the
LaTeX Companion.

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