[referencer] More Thoughts on Referencer

John Spray jcspray at icculus.org
Mon Apr 30 09:54:17 EDT 2007


On Sun, 2007-04-29 at 21:22 +0000, Carlos Moffat wrote:
> 1) Although DOI lookup is really great, many papers are not available
> that way. These days I'm using google scholar and its 'Import into
> BibTex' feature to copy and paste into pybliographer. Problem is,
> referencer doesn't seem to have a way to copy 'native' bibtex code into
> the database. This would be greatly appreciated. Of course, a direct
> query and import using Google Scholar would be just fantastic. 

Bibtex pasting shouldn't be too difficult, and is a likely candidate for
a new feature in the next release.  Interfacing with google scholar
would be interesting, although I'm not aware of google providing a
public API for this kind of thing.


> 2) Although I like the icon view, is not very useful as it only displays
> the key. Any way extra info could be displayed, maybe when hovering with
> the mouse over the file, clicking on it,  or something? 

The GtkIconView used for this is quite limited, and tends to become quite problematic when displaying anything more than short strings.  Displaying extra information as a tooltip is a good idea, I will look into it.

> 
> 3) I haven't checked very carefully, but some of the DOI lookups give
> the wrong results. For example 10.1002/joc.798 gives the right
> title/journal/year but only lists one author (it has three).

The single-author problem is related to the way crossref.org supply the metadata -- the files they provide actually only include one author.  This would be fixed in the future with a switch to the OAI-PMH protocol for metadata harvesting.  When that happens more databases will be supported as well.  Implementing solid OAI-PMH support will take a bit of time.

Thanks for the feedback,
John






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