Academia, academic publishing

Scholarly Search

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Was looking for a resource to import citations/references for book chapters into a citation manager. Turns out Google Scholar does export to several citation managers:

Google Scholar Help
How can I add the full citation of a result on Google Scholar to my bibliography manager?

Just visit the Scholar Preferences page and select your preferred citation format in the “Bibliography Manager” section. We currently support RefWorks, RefMan, EndNote, and BibTeX. Once you’ve saved your preferences, you can import a citation by clicking on the appropriate link in your Google Scholar search results.

Had been using Google Scholar since it came out but had never noticed this feature. D’oh! (Simpson 1989).

It’s not perfect, of course. The data for most citations is quite minimal (initials instead of first names, no abstracts…) but the principle is sound. Plus, Google Scholar links to a lot of external resources, including full-text articles, which usually do have much more data. It helps to either be on-campus at an institution which subscribes to most of the important resources or to have a VPN to such a campus. In that case, Google Scholar’s links do bring you to a lot of full-text articles.

No idea what the API for Google Scholar allows but chances are that some neat features could be added from within a citation manager. The open-source ones would be good bets. At this point, my favourite open-source citation manager is BibDesk. It uses the BibTeX format and takes advantage of several features of Mac OS X such as the Services menu and Spotlight searching.
While it’s not open-source, RefWorks is a very interesting citation management system which often available to all members of an academic institution. Because it uses a Web interface, RefWorks can be difficult to connect to some other tools. But it has a surprisingly large range of features and can be used as a central repository for references. Among its most useful features for courses, RefWorks allows for reference sharing.
Thomson’s EndNote has become something of a de facto standard in the world of academic publishing. It has several disadvantages, including a habit of expensive incremental updates and lack of support for a wide range of text editors and word processors. EndNote also has several interesting features, including connection to library catalogs through the Z39.50 standard and data visualization. Because of its prominence, it tends to be well-supported by most reference databases, including Google Scholar. Indiana University has site-licenses for EndNote and other citation managers.

And there are many other tools available, each with their own sets of features. The citation management scene has evolved nicely, in my humble opinion, but the perfect solution is still far on the horizon, it seems. Ah, well…

books, literature

These Are a Few of My Favourite Books

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Here are my current Listmania Lists on Amazon. Nothing fancy yet. Will definitely have to edit it, adding comments, sorting books more carefully. And there’s no real discovery there, as most of these books and authors are well-known and somewhat older.

These are mostly fiction and literature, though there’s a couple “non-fiction” books in there. Have mostly read books in French, so my favourites in French already amount to two lists (of 25 books each). Some of these books were in another language originally. As a French-speaker, it’s my policy to either read books in the original or in a French translation.

Could really go on and on, there. Some of these authors have been quite prolific and my taste for their books isn’t limited to one or two. Boris Vian is one of them. He also wrote important songs, books about Jazz, drama, short stories, etc. Though he was a «zazou» (“zoot”) and appreciated many parts of U.S. culture, his work is really tied to the French language and, apparently, his work has almost no equivalent in English.

Other authors whose complete works I’ve read or tried to read: Guy de Maupassant, Marcel Proust, Jean Giono, Maurice Leblanc, Marcel Pagnol, Douglas Adams, Woody Allen, John Irving, Robertson Davies, and “Alfred Hitchcock” (actually, a series of children/teenage books written by ghost writers under Hitchcock’s name). Should really do a kind of chronological list. Might even do something similar for music, though that might be more time-consuming (been listening to a lot of quite diverse music for a while).

Ah, well… 

A bilingual blog on disparate subjects. / Un blogue disparate bilingue.