Bibtex

[ProfElm]

Hello everyone!

I am fascinated with the calibre project! I bought an Amazon Kindle for the holidays and quickly found the need to convert different types of E-Books. As a result, I stumbled across calibre.

As a fan of all things Open Source, I enrolled in a class entitled "Open Source Computing." This course is a practicum which requires us to create or take part of an Open Source project. My project of choice was calibre.

Being a student most of my life, I have come to appreciate recursion to do work. How does this tie into anything that I mentioned before? Well... I can explain!

When I was picking a project to contribute to, I had a requirement to meet: the involvement had to contribute some novelty to the project, and I needed to include some academic research explaining why I chose what I did. As I was gathering scientific journal articles, most of them I got over the internet in the form of PDFs. Since I have a long commute from home to school, I added these PDFs to my Kindle using calibre.

After I was done reading a few articles on my Kindle, I realized that I wanted to cite them. I went into my calibre library and tried to export the metadata to form a bibliography but realized that there's no automated process to do so. This is when my idea to develop an extension/plug-in for calibre fostered.

IDEA:
The idea is to use the metadata of the books, articles, documents, etc. within calibre to generate a bibliography. It would start by requiring the user to specify what sources were used, if there are any more, if there are any external ones, and finish by specifying what bibliography format is required. Once executed, a file would be created which contains this bibliography generated with the documents within calibre.
My goal is to generate a BibTex document with the metadata from calibre.

What do you all think?

[kovidgoyal]

You can already export your calibre catalog in Bintext format. click the arrow next to convert and choose create catalog. Select bibtext as your catalog format.

[Debby]

ProfElm,

I tried to use Calibre to organize articles used in our publications but it was too time consuming as every article had to be entered manually. However, it has now evolved and includes significantly more opportunities for customization.

What would be of incredible value would be a plugin (similar to ISBN) that reads the first page of the article and picks out the the relevant information (tile, authors, Journal, etc.) and then gathers the metadata from pub med or other similar sites and populates custom columns.

Then a simple way to export selected articles in various publication outputs (APA, MLA, etc) in appropriate format. Sorry Kovid, but going through the steps to create a catalog would be way too complicated for many people. It is surprising how many of my colleagues are computer illiterate.

Another issue for academic settings - the lack of ability to independently download and install programs. For us, that privilege was lost when the OR computers were all taken over by a celebrity sex tape.

Best of luck on your project!

Of course, this probably impossible.....but I like to dream

[Stampercam]

Originally Posted by ProfElm

After I was done reading a few articles on my Kindle, I realized that I wanted to cite them. I went into my calibre library and tried to export the metadata to form a bibliography but realized that there's no automated process to do so. This is when my idea to develop an extension/plug-in for calibre fostered.

For what it's worth I do a lot of academic reading on my reader also, so this functionality would actually serve me and others very well. The potential difference between a dedicated process for this purpose and a catalog seems to me to be that for a bibliography for the purposes of a research paper, I wouldn't need all the citation information for every paper or book in my database, but only the relevent papers.

I currently use the reading list plugin to maintain a list of the documents that I've needed for a recent paper and the ability to create a bibliography from a list like that excites me just a little

I can't help at all with the development but I do really like the idea.

[kovidgoyal]

Originally Posted by Stampercam

The potential difference between a dedicated process for this purpose and a catalog seems to me to be that for a bibliography for the purposes of a research paper, I wouldn't need all the citation information for every paper or book in my database, but only the relevent papers.

If you simply select the books in your calibre book list, the catalog will only be generated for the selected books.

[ProfElm]

Kovidgoyal,

Thank you for bringing this up! Had you never explained this to the community, I never would have guessed that it was possible.

I think that this feature is hidden. I would like to develop a tutorial for the calibre documentation on how to generate a .bib file.

[kovidgoyal]

Feel free, I am always happy to add tutorials to the User Manual.

[Stampercam]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

If you simply select the books in your calibre book list, the catalog will only be generated for the selected books.

Cool, didn't know that. I thought it had to be the whole database... happy to be corrected

[kovidgoyal]

Be aware that you have to select at least three books for this, otherwise the whole database is used. Also, IIRC, if you use a search to restrict the shown books, only the shown books will be used, but I may be misremembering.

[Stampercam]

Thanks Kovid, I'll give that a go.

[ProfElm]

Hey there!

I have posted the documentation on Google Documents! Please let me know if there's a way that we can improve on it! I have also attached a slightly different version (formatted on MS Office 2007 -- I was at work but I would've used some Open Source alternative )

You can go ahead and post here or preferably send me an e-mail at labeledloser at gmail dot com. I'm so glad to be able to contribute whatever I can to this great project!

Is there any way that this can make its way into the Calibre User Manual?

[kovidgoyal]

@ProfElm: You dont need to have python installed, calibre comes with its own python. If you can add some sections on creating catalogs in other formats as well csv/xml/epub/mobi I'll be hapy to include your write up in the User Manual.h

[GRiker]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Be aware that you have to select at least three books for this, otherwise the whole database is used. Also, IIRC, if you use a search to restrict the shown books, only the shown books will be used, but I may be misremembering.

Actually, the logic is:
- If a single book or no book is selected, the entire database is cataloged.
- If 2 or more books are selected, then only the selected books are cataloged.
(relevant code in gui2.actions.catalog:GenerateCatalogAction.generat e_catalog)

You are correct about the search being an active filter.

G

[kiwidude]

Moderator Notice
Moved from the plugin ideas thread

[Manichean]

Originally Posted by Debby

What would be of incredible value would be a plugin (similar to ISBN) that reads the first page of the article and picks out the the relevant information (tile, authors, Journal, etc.) and then gathers the metadata from pub med or other similar sites and populates custom columns.

That feature would make Calibre a good alternative to Mendeley, which I've recently started using.