Feature of the Week: BibSonomy TeXlipse Plugin

A core functionality of BibSonomy is to serve as a central repository for searching, collecting, organizing and sharing publications. However, our ambition is higher: Our vision is to support you during all phases of the "lifecycle" of a scientific publication - i.e. from its very creation throughout its spread through the communities.

Today's feature of the week focusses on a great tool which supports the writing process - namely the TeXlipse plugin written by Manuel Lutz. TeXlipse - as you will know - is a popular Eclipse plugin which turns your beloved IDE installation to a full-fledged LaTeX paper production environment. Usually, references are hereby stored in a regular .bib file, which contains the papers you plan to cite in your work (using the BibTeX format). This basically means you have a local publication repository, specifically to be used for the current paper. But of course at the same time, you have an online repository in BibSonomy... wouldn't it be great if you could cite the relevant papers "directly" from the online collection?

If I'm asking questions this way, you already know - that's exactly what the TeXlipse plugin does. But step by step: You can simply install the plugin via TeXlipse's update site:

In order to connect you to BibSonomy, simply enter your username and API key into the settings dialogue:

... and check the checkbox "Enable BibSonomy import". Tataa, that's it! When using TeXlipse the next time to cite an article (via the usual auto completion feature), your online entries (2) will appear together with those stored in the local file (3). Entries present in both collection have an own symbol (1):

Isn't that cool? No more copying around .bib files from here to there, no more BibTeX exports from BibSonomy in different paper production phases - just a single online repository, and you're done!! (That's the moment for applause, ladies and gentlemen :) ).

You may say "But in BibSonomy, I got 1000 entries, and for my current paper I only need a subset of those" - no problem, just tag them appropriately, and you can filter the entries displayed by the TeXlipse plugin:

These and further features are also explained on the help page for the plugin. As usual, we're happy about and feedback if you find this as useful as we do - in any case, keep on writing best papers with this great tool :) and of course happy tagging,
  Dominik