Research Publications Web Page?

Jabagi writes: "Hi, I am computer engineering undergrad. and my department in the university has given me the job of doing a web site that displays its publications in digital format. So I wanted to ask if anybody knows any good [prefereably university-originated] web pages that have a publication for research pages with an easy to use interface. A very good one in my opinion is from MIT. I would also accept any suggestions to what should be included on such a page [for example, which formats do you prefer the documents to be in, what types of information should be present, etc...]"

Comments

There is more than one way to do it...

[sorinm]

therefore, it should be done in more ways than one. I would go for a fast database backend (such as mysql) and insert in the database the title, authors and abstract and keywords. Then, if your people have latex source, use hatex2html to produce html use pdflatex to produce latex, use latex2rtf to produce rtf and let the user choose the format. If there are ps files you have ps2pdf, ps2html and possible others. A text search would be nice if you have the harddisk space required. Use pdftotext and ps2ascii to convert to ascii, then index the whole stuff (much like google does). Sorin M

Origami

[atropa]

I've been working on a project to organise and present documents by faculty at the University of Kentucky called Origami. Take a loot here to see where i've gone with it. It's written in PHP and uses mysql and the local filesystem to store paper information. If you'd like I can write some quick documentation and send you a tarball of what i've got so far.

Not a popular opinion

[gmhowell]

This is probably not going to be a popular opinion, but having documents available in pdf is a good thing. Most of your users are going to have readers, and the output is consistent.

You should also include HTML and SGML formats.

Depending on your users, they might demand .doc formats. It's probably better to ask your users rather than Slashdot. They know what they want to use themselves, and are more familiar with the standard formats of their particular academic community.

In some ways, this seems like the 'Ask a SlashdotLawyer' type of questions.

-George

Check out the ACM

[martyb]

The ACM (Association for Computing Machinery is rolling out The ACM Portal to Computing Literature. It looks to me that your timing is perfect, as they say on the ACM home page:

Visit the NEW ACM Portal - (and try the Online Guide to Computing Literature for FREE through 9/30/01)!

I learned of this from reading the article "ACM Opens Portal to Computing Literature" which appeared in the (dead tree) July 2001 Issue of "Communications of the ACM" Vol. 44, No. 7.

Here is part of a salient paragraph:

While it is currently out-of-scope for the Portal to capture the references in works put out by other publishers, it is intended to create a comprehensive bibliographic database by capturing all the references in ACM articles that cite works from other publishers and for which there is no matching bibliographic entry in the database.

I would suggest you contact the ACM and see if they have any suggestions on what you are attempting. I would expect they have already explored a number of alternatives, one of which might be just what you are looking for.

If you should decide to create your own system, please consider making it open-source so that others may benefit as well.

Re:Check out the ACM

[staplin]

And if not the entire ACM Portal, at least look at the ACM's digital library.

It provides the ability to search on a variety of fields (title, author, keywords, full text, etc) and to download in PDF if available.

Searching is free, but you need a subscription or pay-per-use to get the full text. With membership, you also get access to a useful "My Bookshelf" tool where you can save and organize search results and individual papers.

My only complaint is that for some older articles, the PDF seems to be generated from an image scan of the text, rather than the text itself, resulting in huge files for only a few pages.

Organizing Research Texts

[annielaurie]

You could do a lot worse than that page at MIT. It's readable and navigable, and it gets the job done. Things they did particularly right: It's navigable from just about wherever you are. It gives you a clearly delineated path back from where you came. It appears to be all text-based (therefore accessible to all.) It's easily searchable. If they made one mistake it was in not using anchor tags on that first index page to carry the user back to the top area of the page (where the path navigation and left-hand navigation are located).

Although it pains me horribly to say it, I think PDF is a good bet. (And I hope somebody comes up with a viable alternative soon.) I'd pick that, plain HTML, and some other format you decide on that prevails at your institution--whether it be .doc, text, or something else. You want above all to make it useful to the people who need to read it, so let their opinions prevail.

Have fun.

Academic Repository

[DoctorWho]

The NEC Research Institute hosts a very nice warehouse of academic literature. Claims to be "Earth's largest free full-text index of scientific literature."

Not all of the documents cited are available for download, but those that are are available as PostScript, PDF, and GIF.
Scripts generate papers that aren't cached in a specific format on request.

The page layout is familiar enough for those used to staring at lists of academic references, and is easy to follow.

Re:Let the user choose the format

[matthewg]

PostScript compresses well with standard compression formats such as gzip or bzip2.