µBib | Citations, BibTeX, and Research

[zeitlings]

 µBib | MicroBib

Citations, BibTeX, and Research

 

The workflow combines the APIs of Crossref, Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, OpenLibrary, Wikipedia, Google Books, and doi.org. Reference metadata is highly inconsistent, incomplete, erroneous or otherwise flawed across different sources. µBib tries to remedy this by heuristically aggregating information from different sources into one best possible result.

 

 

Core Functions

• Reference lookup using DOI, ISBN, PMID, PMCID, MAG, arXiv, ACL identifiers, and URLs (e.g. jstor)
• CSL formatted citations from identifiers and BibTeX
• Free-text search for publication discovery
• Author lookup and publication retrieval
• Ad hoc citation graph traversal
• Lightweight BibTeX reference management and citation picker

 

Note: The workflow has some interoperability with my DEVONthink workflow (Forum Thread, Github)

Documentation

Find the full documentation on Github

 

Previews

Metadata retrieval

 

Reference Management & Citation Picker

Edited May 18, 2023 by zeitlings

[andyedin]

What a fantastic workflow! Thanks for the work.

 

One tiny question: I have trouble adding a new reference style. I used 'ubib ::' to add a new one, for example IEEE, but it doesn't seem to have any effect afterwards.

 

 

[zeitlings]

Hey @andyedin,

I just checked the IEEE citation style, and it looks like Citeproc fails to parse it:

 

Failed to get Citation with style 'ieee' with error: The operation couldn’t be completed. (CiteprocRsKit.CRError error 1.)

(The debugger can provide some information if something doesn't work as expected: When viewing the workflow in Alfred, press cmd+D to open the panel.)

 

The error is not very descriptive, unfortunately. I've noticed the same behavior with other citation styles. For example, APA 6th edition was updated a few days ago, and the parsing has been failing ever since. (Others seem to have the same problems: #156.) Something is causing Citeproc to panic and I don't know why. The best idea I have for now is to find an alternative version of the style. This one seems to work, for example: IEEE (with URL). You could also try to compare the two styles to find out what the problem might be. You can find the styles like this: ubib :c > Browse Data Folder > csl.

Edited May 19, 2023 by zeitlings

[andyedin]

Thanks for the prompt reply. I will try the workaround solution as you mentioned. Hail for this fantastic workflow.

[zeitlings]

@andyedin I have a quick follow-up. I've identified the issue with the IEEE style sheet. It seems that a certain conditional statement, responsible for handling video entries, is not being handled properly. This modified version, with the relevant part commented out, is now working on my end. 🤗 To apply the updated style sheet, you can simply paste the XML as "ieee.csl" into the Data Folder.

[andyedin]

On 7/26/2017 at 11:10 AM, deanishe said:

I'm not sure if that's actually possible.

 

AFAIK, there's no reliable way to get a list of the most recently changed files (there is a mechanism, but IIRC, Microsoft products don't use it, so you can forget about Word and Excel).

 

And adding the file as an attachment to the message you're currently writing is, as you say, basically magic.

 

It might be possible using Mail.app, which has very good AppleScript support, but I think you can forget about it if you're using a different email client.

 

More realistic is grabbing the last-edited file and creating a new email with it attached.

Wow, that's great!

Another tiny thing I noticed is that even if I delete the default CSL AMA, Chicago, or MLA, as some of them are not useful for me, the workflow will automatically add them back. I can live with that, but  just wanted to point it out if it is not your intentional design.

[zeitlings]

You can remove those from the workflow configuration (the list of identifiers). When they’re gone from there, you can permanently delete them. They are there to ensure that something is present initially. Admittedly, this part is a left-over from an earlier stage of the workflow that didn’t support ad hoc CSL management and could probably go away~