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P2P Bibliographies with Bibster
Noksagt writes "P2P isn't just for government documents anymore! Bibster assists researchers in managing, searching, and sharing bibliographic data in a peer-to-peer network. This project shows great promise to researchers who currently search for citations through centralized servers (Google, Scirus, CiteSeer, ISI. and many others). By making it decentralized, researchers can share bibliographic data with no subscription costs and avoid typing this data in by hand. It can import and export citations using bibtex. The project is GPLed and free clients for windows and Linux are available. There's also a Sourceforge page for Bibster, so you can checkout from the CVS if the Bibster site is slow."
Maybe. On the other hand, an encyclopedia every idiot can add to turned out alright. But they have a certain amount of centralized control to keep things from getting out of hand.
Fortunately, few idiots (or anyone else) have much of an incentive to falsify bibliographic data.
-jim
...married to a non-geek (getting her PhD in Psych). When I told her about this system, she said:
"My system's better anyway. I have a file, with the exact bibliography printed on the folder, for every article I've read or written. If I need one, it's right there. If I need to use the citation, I can just copy it from my Excel spreadsheet. Now why would this thing be better?"
Some people are born geeks, I guess.
eTBlast is a bibliographic search engine to which you submit an entire abstract. A little natural language processing and the results returned are to articles which have similiar abstracts. Though the tool operates on the Medline database, there is no reason the algorithm couldn't be used with Bibster.
OK, so if citeseer has text for most articles and abstracts + citations for all, then explain why we need a P2P service to do less?