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Online reference tool, primarily (but not exclusively) for academics
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Posted by MadaboutDana
Dec 3, 2014 at 12:14 PM
Looks quite interesting, albeit solely available online:
Posted by MadaboutDana
Dec 3, 2014 at 12:19 PM
Oops, I tell a lie. Online it may be, but it also uses mobile apps (iOS, Android) rather ingeniously so you can photograph/scan URLs or book barcodes with your device and regenerate them immediately in a huge variety of bibliographical/citation/reference formats (6,500 different styles available!).
Rather clever!
Posted by Dr Andus
Dec 3, 2014 at 03:28 PM
Thanks for the heads-up. Crowd-sourcing the bibliographic info sounds interesting, but I’m put off by this:
“RefME plans to charge publishers a fee for pushing people towards their books and publications.”
It sounds like they want to become the Facebook of referencing, or something like that. But I can’t see how it would be good for science to have sponsored results pushed in your face when you’re doing research, with the risk of overshadowing more relevant results.
Posted by MadaboutDana
Dec 3, 2014 at 04:25 PM
Oh dear, I see what you mean. The merchandising of information. ‘Twas ever thus…
Posted by jamesofford
Dec 4, 2014 at 06:33 PM
This is interesting. They are not the first to do this. Or something like this. One of the things about Papers from Mekentosj is that it will try to match the metadata for the PDF you have imported, and populate the fields in its database so that you don’t have to manually enter the info. Title, authors, source, publication date etc. Pretty handy. It got even better when they started using data that other people have imported to match to your pdf. So now Papers asks if you want to upload your metadata, and then it uses those data to help suss out metadata for others. And you benefit as well since when you enter a pdf Papers uses the metadata from everyone else out there to match your paper.
While the original matching worked okay, I still had to manually enter a lot of data. Probably about 30% or so wouldn’t match. Once they started doing things this way the number of articles for which I had to manually enter the data dropped to zero.
Now, if only version 3 didn’t suck so badly.
Jim