Comments on: Any opinions on BibSonomy?

By: Kevin

Kevin — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 08:25:26 +0000

I use bibsonomy all the time, love it. I’m definitely looking forward to more screen scraping though, and more export options. One thing that might make bibsonomy attract more users fast is if they added something like the ottobib export options; if you can convince a first-year student that this site will give you a quick and simple reference list for pasting into your Word document, in APA style and everything, then you’ve got it sold. Right now, bibsonomy is great for geeks, but not so much for everyone else.

I tried Zotero, but since I use Opera and not Firefox it seemed rather pointless (also, I hate having slow extensions running constantly, when I only use them for five minutes at a time — maybe Zotero’s better suited for site-specific browsers).

Regarding copyright; I’m pretty sure that the pdf’s you upload can only be read by you, so it’s basically like having it on your private email account / drive.

By: Arthur

Arthur — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 09:12:45 +0000

As I’m one of the BibSonomy team I will not make too much advertisement for the system. I will only point you to some new stuff which is related to the comments. First we started with the development of screen scrapers. Currently we support ACM, CiteSeer, http://arxiv.org/, and the library of the University of Karlsruhe. We will add more supported sites in the future. We are now working on a new/extented version of the system which will include a rest api. Via this api the JabRef tool will be connected. A prototype of the api and JabRef is up but I can not tell you any date when we can release it. Any feedback is very welcome.

By: leobard

leobard — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 21:21:22 +0000

Gunnar is using Bibsonomy. I have an account. We use it for some professional stuff in Nepomuk (managing Bibtex in a group).

For bookmarks, its also nice.

You would install semantic mediawiki on this server at dowhatimean.net or on your desktop? (if its desktop, I know this system that…)

By: MUslar

MUslar — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 19:44:39 +0000

I prefer bibsonomy to connotea and citeulike because of the content - it is more computer science related, more tags are available and more interesting papers. However, it is often a bit strange loading all my papers on their server - are there any copyright problems when submitting IEEE papers or something similar? On the other hand, it’s great to have everything available on the web- I used to work with JabRef using a custom export, grouping and my own webserver - now it is much more convenient.

By: jahrynx

jahrynx — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 12:28:44 +0000

Didn’t know BibSonomy, I may take a look, thanks for the entry. You may also be interrested by http://www.citeulike.org which does the same. A feature i like and that i think bibsonomy miss is the possibility to post a copy of the pdf/ps to the site, so you can access it from everywhere.

By: Arne

Arne — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 10:13:29 +0000

You should use it - everybody should use it, because then the desired network effects would kick in. I get the impression it hasn’t yet gathered the critical user mass necessary for the emergence of “wisdom of crowds”. But I hope that it will develop eventually, until then the added value when compared to desktop tools like BibDesk is marginal.

By: Neil

Neil — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 23:08:30 +0000

I use it daily. Mostly for its Bibtex capabilities and tagging. I haven’t tried the RDF stuff yet but SWRC is supported. It lacks robust screenscraping (e.g. ACM), but they have a DBLP feed you can copy from, and if you have a bibtex snippet that works perfectly. Best of all it seems to be a fairly active and responsive group working on it.

By: Bruce

Bruce — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 20:11:59 +0000

You might give Zotero a try.