Release 3.8.6 + Java-REST-Client update

Dear BibSonomy users,

right before Christmas we decided to release BibSonomy Version 3.8.6. This minor update includes a couple of bugfixes and minor improvements. For example:

• Adding publications by DOI is now working more reliable
• BibTex mass-export now contains your tags as keywords
• Updated existing scrapers and added new ones (e.g. academic.oup.com)
• ...

Beside that we updated our Java-REST-Client. Spaces in search terms are no longer replaced by „+“. In case you are using the Java-REST-client we recommend to update to the latest version.

If you find something not working as you think it should, drop us a message either per Twitter or mail :)

Happy Tagging!
Mario

Firefox and Chrome Extension Update

Firefox Quantum was released last month. We are happy to announce that version 1.10.1 of our "BibSonomy Buttons" extension is fully compatible with the new Firefox version.

Firefox now supports the Browser Extensions standard, the same API that our Chrome extension uses. We adapted our Chrome browser extension to also work with Firefox to only develop one extension for both browser.

Furthermore, we also updated the shortcut feature. Instead of using our own implementation, we now use the commands API. The default shortcuts are:

• myBibsonomy: Ctrl+Shift+Y (macOS: Ctrl+Shift+H)
• save bookmark: Ctrl+Shift+X (macOS: Ctrl+Shift+B)
• save publication: Ctrl+Shift+V (macOS: Ctrl+Shift+P)

We also published a new version of our Chrome extension. Please visit the Chrome Web Store for more information.

Happy browsing and tagging,
Daniel

Feature of the Week: Smart bibliographies for Jekyll web pages

If you like Jekyll for rendering web pages then check out the new Jekyll plugin for BibSonomy. If you do not know Jekyll, yet, you might check out its web site and then test the plugin.

What it is

Jekyll is an easy-to-use but powerful generator for static web pages which is used to render HTML pages on GitHub and GitHub pages. It is also quite flexible, since its functionality can be extended by plugins that, for instance, create tag clouds, embed maps, or generate a sitemap.
Recently, we have released the first version of a Jekyll plugin for BibSonomy which renders bibliographies (publication lists) in Jekyll-generated web pages using data from BibSonomy. Every time the site is built, the plugin retrieves the latest posts from BibSonomy and renders them in one of the many thousand available CSL styles. Optionally, the plugin can download and link documents associated with a post and render an Altmetric badge for each publication with a DOI. For instance, my publication list is rendered using a slightly adapted Springer LNCS stylesheet with some CSS that colourises the item bullets in the list using the DBLP color coding scheme for different publication types.

How it looks

The color of the bullets indicates the publication type: conference papers are blue, journal articles are magenta. An entry with an Altmetric badge looks as follows:

How to use

Using the plugin is quite simple: just add some lines of configuration to your site’s _config.yml file and then place the bibsonomy tag into the page where you want the bibliography to be rendered.

1. First, add the dependency to the plugin to your Gemfile:
   
   

   source "https://rubygems.org"
   
   gem 'bibsonomy-jekyll'
   

   
   
2. The most basic configuration just enables the plugin and provides your user name and API key:
   
   

   gems:
     - bibsonomy-jekyll
   
   bibsonomy:
     user: yourusername
     apikey: yourapikey
   

   
   You can get your BibSonomy API key from the settings page.
3. Options for customization in the bibsonomy section include:
   
   

   document_directory: pdf
   style: acm-sig-proceedings
   altmetric_badge_type: 4
   

   
   where:
   • the document_directory specifies a directory where documents attached to posts shall be downloaded from BibSonomy and linked on the page. If empty, no documents are downloaded.
   • style specifies the name of a CSL style which should be contained in the Ruby CSL library or provided as a file with the same name and the file name extension .csl.
   • altmetric_badge_type adds a HTML <span> element to each publication with a DOI that renders the Altmetric badge with the corresponding id, when the required JavaScript is included on the page.
4. Now a bibliography can be rendered on any page by including the bibsonomy tag:
   
   

   {% bibsonomy user yourusername myown 3 %}
   

   
   This would render the latest three posts of the user “yourusername” which have the tag “myown”. A variable number of tags can be provided (separated by space) and instead of a user’s posts the posts of a group can be rendered by exchanging user with group followed by the corresponding group name.

That’s it. More details can be found in the plugin’s documentation.

Happy bookmarking!

Yesterday's Downtime

Dear BibSonomy users,

yesterday, we experienced a short downtime of our servers. This was due to a large number of documents being uploaded at once which made one of our servers freeze.

However, we fixed that issue and made sure that it won't happen again. If you still encounter any bugs or unexpected behavior, let us know by either posting an issue in our issue tracker or by dropping us an email at webmaster@bibsonomy.org :)

Happy tagging
Thomas

Feature of the week: BibSonomy Scholar with seamless posting

We previously posted about our BibSonomy Scholar Chrome extension here and here. We have further improved it and are now scraping the BibTex from Google Scholar itself in order to support more a hassle-free posting experience. It works a lot faster now and always works. Previously the posting process often broke due to unknown publisher pages or broken scraping programs. One downside of this is that Google Scholar often provides rather incomplete or plainly wrong BibTex entries. To cope with this we added a BibTex-preview button so that you can check the posted information beforehand. Overall the extension works a lot smoother now and we hope you like it. Let us know if you find any issues.

Happy posting
Martin

Typo3 Plugin: New Version Released!

Hi community,

we just released a new version of our Typo3 plugin for BibSonomy! We fixed some issues and added some features:

• Capitalization issues fixed
• Improved 'notes' placement
• PDFs are now opened in a new tab
• completed DBLP-like sort

Have fun with using BibSonomy :)

Best
Thomas

HTTP access will be disabled in September 2017

From September 2017 on access to BibSonomy will only be possible via TLS encrypted connections (that is, HTTPS). BibSonomy’s REST API support HTTPS for some time and in September 2016 we had introduced SSL support for the BibSonomy web pages. This ensures that all your data is encrypted on the way to your browser to protect your privacy. In September we will disable unencrypted access to BibSonomy, that is, all non-encrypted (HTTP) requests to BibSonomy will be redirected using HTTP 301 responses to the corresponding HTTPS (SSL) pages. For browser-based access this should not make any difference, however, some plugins and extensions that are using the REST API might be affected by this.

BibSonomy integrates well with other services and tools but the underlying source code might not be able to properly resolve the HTTP redirects, yet. Therefore, in case your service or tool is relying on a connection to BibSonomy, please check whether it properly supports HTTP redirects or migrate it directly to use HTTPS (which is our suggestion). We have already migrated the PHP client library as well as the Typo3 extension. The Python and Ruby clients also already support HTTPS. The source code of other extensions is available on BitBucket and we appreciate any help in the migration effort. Please submit pull requests for the libraries and tools you are using.

We hope that our move towards encrypted-only access does not cause any problems and that you will have enough time until September to migrate your code.

Release 3.8

Dear BibSonomy users,

we published version 3.8 of BibSonomy. Next to a huge number of bugfixes (see https://bitbucket.org/bibsonomy/bibsonomy/pull-requests/10/release-38/diff), the main improvements are:

• The Genealogy feature received a major overhaul.
• We added a "misc" field editor for publication entries.
• 404 pages now show error messages, if a user or a group account couldn't be found.

As always, if you find something not working as you think it should, drop us a message either per Twitter or mail :)

Happy tagging
Thomas

Directly accessing PDFs from BibSonomy in TeXlipse

When writing some article in LaTeX you use a statement like this \cite{becker2016sparktrails} to cite your references. Yet, especially when putting together your related work, you need to have a look at the article again. Dependent on how you manage your references, this includes a more or less cumbersome search for the the publication and the PDF associated with the corresponding Bib-Key (becker2016sparktrails).

Now, in case you are managing your publications and references with BibSonomy diligently uploading your PDFs (e.g., using the Chrome plug-in BibSonomy Scholar) in combination with the LaTeX editor TeXlipse, we came up with a little shortcut:

Mark the Bib-Tex Key, hit F9 (or any shortcut), and the PDF will open in your favorite PDF viewer.

To achieve this, we use a Python 3 script to download our references and take advantage of the External Tool configuration and corresponding shortcuts provided by Eclipse. This is a little hacky, but it works nicely in most cases. With a little more programming, this approach can probably be integrated more tightly and even work with other editors as well (such as TeXstudio or TeXmaker).

For details, please see this blog entry by Martin Becker.

Have fun writing your manuscript :D
Martin

BibSonomy + BibLaTeX: A powerful combination

Researchers often have to deal with citing someone else’s work in my publications. The probably most widely used combination for writing papers with references is pdflatex + bibtex. While those two programs work pretty well, they don’t have too many features. Furthermore, while maintaining a bibliography became a lot easier with BibSonomy, it still is a tedious task to extract the right references for each new paper by hand and save them into a bibtex file in the corresponding project. This leads to cluttered references across several publications, as any changes in one's BibSonomy collection are not retrospectively applied to the .bib-files of older publications. While there is a BibSonomy plugin for TeXlipse, it is not actively maintained today while having a few issues, such as not automatically refreshing or synchronizing the local bibliography with BibSonomy or placing the downloaded keys into a file with fixed location and name.
BibLaTeX is an extension for BibTeX, which provides some nice functionality. It is e.g. now possible to just add the following two lines to the LaTeX project header to not having to bother with ever-different keys and inconsistent bibliographies:

\usepackage[backend=biber]{biblatex}
\addbibresource[location=remote]
    {http://www.bibsonomy.org/bib/user/thoni/myown}

Later on,  the bibliography can be printed by just typing

\printbibliography

Now every time the PDF file is compiled, the list of publications in BibSonomy with the tag "myown" from the user "thoni" will be downloaded. This is especially useful when adding new papers to the BibSonomy collection while working at the "Related Work" section or similar.

While this is only a very basic example of how BibLaTeX and BibSonomy integration could work, there are many possibilities to extend this, e.g. by further restricting the \printbibliography command with tag selection or printing the bibliography several times from just one source. A more exhaustive introduction to BibLaTeX can be found at the corresponding ShareLaTeX page.

Happy tagging (and easier writing ;) )
Thomas