Monday, April 2, 2007

Feature of the Week: Customizable Publication Exports

Many of you may already be using the export facilities for publication entries that BibSonomy offers; until recently, there were options to export your BibTeX as RSS, RDF, Endnote, or one particular plain HTML format.

Now we've revamped the export facilities by including the export layout engine from the great JabRef stand-alone BibTeX manager. Clicking on the more button next to the publication column header will take you to a list of publication output formats that are now available—right now there are 17! These include an RTF export for standard text processors such as Word, CSV which is easily imported to spreadsheets, as well as fancy HTML tables with sorting capabilities that you can integrate right into you web site.

Here are some examples:
If there is still a layout missing that you need for your particular application, you can make your own! The JabRef documentation describes how custom export filters can be written using a special markup language. Once you've written your filter, you can upload three files: the piece of markup for formatting each entry, plus a custom header and footer; thus, you can get a complete, valid HTML page with your custom publication list out of BibSonomy which can directly be linked to without further processing. The URL scheme for these layouts is as follows: http://www.bibsonomy.org/layout/[filter]/[rest of BibSonomy URL] e.g. if I want to format my own publications of 2006 with the html filter: http://www.bibsonomy.org/layout/html/user/schmitz/myown+2006 See also Mark Schenk's page for some great examples of JabRef layouts.

Have fun!

Christoph