Re: zotero (or mendeley) integration with org

[Matt Lundin <mdl@imapmail.org>]

Rasmus <rasmus.pank@gmail.com> writes:

>> [Matt and William's setup]
>
> I have looked for a good way to keep track of academic papers (pdfs) and
> Bibtex for a long time. I'd love to see a worg page on this topic.
>
> Meanwhile, I have found some sweet Bibtex-search interfaces for
> Emacs. These will query a academic search engine and can copy Bibtex
> entries directly to a .bib file. I found bibsnarfl[fn:1] being the most
> interesting, but a similar code is available for PubMed[fn:2].
> Unfortunately, being limited to certain fields, I am personally not able
> to adopt either. It would be great to have an interface to a general
> academic search engine (Google Scholar, ugh?).

Agreed. Google Scholar citations need very close proofreading, as they
can be erroneous or poorly formatted. I would submit that one should
never use a Google Scholar citation without checking it carefully
against the article or book to which it refers. An advantage of Google
Scholar, however, is that it offers skeletal bibtex entries for books
and articles in a wide variety of fields, whereas many of the databases
accessed by bibsnarf are limited to math and sciences. Since I use
biblatex together with the Chicago Manual of Style, any bibtex entry I
clip has to be edited and tweaked substantially. (Indeed, manual editing
is unavoidable when using biblatex.)

FWIW, here's my workflow:

1. Clip a bibtex citation or unformatted bibliographical data using
   org-capture and conkeror or emacs. (This generates a timestamp and a
   link to where I first found the reference --- very useful data for
   reviewing one's own research habits and sources.)
2. Download the pdf, if possible (or make a todo to get/read it later).
3. While in the capture buffer, use org-attach to move the pdf quickly
   from ~/Downloads to the attachments directory (this is much faster
   than it sounds).
4. Create or correct a bibtex source block within the org entry.
5. Make a TODO to read the pdf. :)

Later, when I read the document, I proofread the bibtex entry once again
and call a function that moves it to a centralized bibtex file, leaving
a link in its place. As a rule, any citation that goes into my official
bibtex file *must* be correct and complete. Reftex, another of Carsten's
ingenious creations, is very handy for creating links to the citation
while taking notes.

For my own purposes, there would be little point in automating this
process, as any pdf I download needs to be inspected manually and any
bibtex entry I clip needs to be proofread and tweaked. The process
itself forces me to check every citation for accuracy.

Best,
Matt