This week's feature of the week is something for our more experienced users but I guess that applies to many Emacs users anyway. ;-)
For all of you that write their LaTeX files using
GNU Emacs I present a small script that simplifies its interaction with BibSonomy.
First, if you don't know and use
RefTeX yet, I highly recommend that you give it a try, it's really awesome! I won't go into detail how to activate it, typically something like
; load reftex
(require 'reftex)
; turn reftex on
(add-hook 'LaTeX-mode-hook 'turn-on-reftex) ; with AUCTeX LaTeX mode
in your Emacs configuration file
~/.emacs should be sufficient.
Adding citations to your LaTeX file with RefTeX is as easy as typing
C-c [. Then you can search for appropriate entries using a regular expression.
What I want to show you in this feature of the week is how you can add a script to RefTeX such that each time RefTeX is initialized your BibTeX references are downloaded from BibSonomy. For this to work you must follow the following steps:
- Find out which posts you want to use from BibSonomy.
- Add an appropriate \bibliography{} command to your LaTeX file.
- Write a small shell script.
- Tell RefTeX about the script.
- Try it!
Find out which posts you want to use from BibSonomy
Let us assume that I am writing a paper about
formal concept analysis (fca). So I want to reference publications from
my list of fca-related publications that I can get at
http://www.bibsonomy.org/user/jaeschke/fca. Since I want
all publications in
BibTeX format, the file I finally want to have is
http://www.bibsonomy.org/bib/user/jaeschke/fca?items=1000. Notice the modifications in bold print.
Add an appropriate \bibliography{} command to your LaTeX file
Since the script presented later is rather simple, this is related to the posts I want to download, i.e., to the tag
fca:
\bibliographystyle{plain}
\bibliography{fca}
That means the BibTeX file will be named after the tag(s) used to query BibSonomy.
Write a small shell script
Of course, we have done this for you. :-) Nevertheless, you should adopt it to your needs, in particular change the variable
BASEURL (e.g., insert your BibSonomy username):
#!/bin/sh
FILE=$1
RESULTFILE=`pwd`/$FILE.bib
BASEURL=http://www.bibsonomy.org/bib/user/jaeschke
PARAMS="?items=1000"
QUERYURL=$BASEURL/$FILE$PARAMS
# the file is downloaded on each call of the script -
# typically on the first call of reftex-citation
wget -q -O - $QUERYURL > $RESULTFILE
# the result for RefTeX: the path to the downloaded file
echo $RESULTFILE
The script gets as input from RefTeX the string from the
\bibliography{} command (if you have several files specified, the script is called for each file). Then, it downloads your posts from BibSonomy using the input as tag of the user
jaeschke. The downloaded file is put into the current directory (named after the tag(s)) and its name is returned to standard output (this is what RefTeX expects).
Place the script at some convenient location, let's say
/usr/local/bin/find_file_from_bibsonomy.sh.
Of course, the script can and should be adopted to your needs. If you have suggestions for improvements, just let us know!
Tell RefTeX about the script
Add the following lines to your
~/.emacs file:
; connect RefTeX with BibSonomy
(setq reftex-use-external-file-finders "yes")
(setq reftex-external-file-finders
(cons '("bib" . "/usr/local/bin/find_file_from_bibsonomy.sh %f")
reftex-external-file-finders)
)
Try it!
Well, just open the LaTeX file and press
C-c [ on your keyboard (for non-Emacs users: Pressing the Ctrl-Key together with "c" and then releasing both keys and pressing "["). Then search for some author name or keyword (e.g., "fca")
and be surprised about the results
You can choose any of the matching posts and the corresponding
\cite{} command is automatically added to your document. And the best thing is: all the posts are coming from BibSonomy!
Further reading
Improvements
The script above
always tries to download the entries from BibSonomy - even if you already have one with that name. Here is an updated version that acts only if the requested file name starts with a configurable prefix, in this case
bibsonomy_.
#!/bin/sh
# All files with publications from BibSonomy should have
# this prefix - to not overwrite other files.
PREFIX="bibsonomy_"
# query
BASEURL="http://www.bibsonomy.org/bib/user/jaeschke"
PARAMS="?items=1000"
# the first parameter is the file name from the \bibliography{}
# command
FILE=$1
# check for prefix
if [ $(echo $FILE | grep "^$PREFIX") ]; then
# prefix found -> work on
# remove prefix for tag query
TAG=$(echo $FILE | sed "s/^$PREFIX//")
# build path for result file and query URL
RESULTFILE=`pwd`/$FILE.bib
QUERYURL=$BASEURL/$TAG$PARAMS
# the file is downloaded on each call of the script - typically on
# the first call of reftex-citation
wget -q -O - $QUERYURL > $RESULTFILE
# the result for RefTeX: the path to the downloaded file
echo $RESULTFILE
else
# just return the file name in case the file is in the current
# directory
echo $FILE.bib
fi
That means that in the example above we must change in our LaTeX document
\bibliography{fca} to
\bibliography{bibsonomy_fca}. That's it!
Further improvements will be added to this section.
Before the summer break we introduced the new review and discussion feature. Now, we have added a page to BibSonomy that gives an overview over all those resources that have been reviewed or commented. You can reach it at www.bibsonomy.org/discussed or just by clicking the new "discussed posts" link in the menu.
The page lists all the recently discussed bookmarks and publications. To make the overview as concise and discussion-focused as possible, the posts are displayed in a reduced form including the title, the description and of cause the average star rating. The stars also function as link to the resource's discussion page, where you can add your own comments or review.
If you are looking for a contribution by someone in particular, there is a user specific version of the "discussed"-page. E. g. www.bibsonomy.org/discussed/user/hotho has bookmarks and publications discussed by user hotho. Find a link to these pages in the sidebar of the regular user pages e. g. www.bibsonomy.org/user/hotho.
