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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."
People who cite will also read the paper before doing so. This system will be useful when one has a paper in hand, but does not have the bibtex entry. No one uses just a citation without the content of the paper.
:)
So you have to prepare the content, and you might as well submit it to those journals, conferences
That looks promising. Will there be an easy way to see a citation index - for example, listing all the publications that cite a given article? (Citeseer does this, and this can be important to academic types.)
Is it just me or is a scientific database every idiot can add to a bad idea?
What would be really nice is to have the full texts of articles available P2P. That's the advantage of using centralized databases from subscribing locations (like universities): you can sometimes access full text for newer articles with just one click. Swapping full texts would be tremendously useful (and would keep us lazy scientists from having to actually get up and go to the library). Yeah yeah, I'm sure there are copyright issues... but doesn't fair use apply somehow? I'm a psychology research assistant at a major university, and at weekly lab meetings we often send around articles by email for everyone to read and then discuss, and I've never even really thought about copyright of them until now. Isn't open sharing of knowledge at the heart of the scientific endeavor? Oh, and also: it would be awesome if user comments could be added to each citation. Like: "this was an influential paper that opened new directions for research on human memory," etc. Of course, you can also get a ROUGH idea of that kind of thing by how many times a paper's been cited by other papers, as someone else already said.
the CVS server will slow down before the website.
The CVS is hosted by sourceforge, which can handle significant load. The website is hosted on some University computer & I had trouble reaching it when I was emailed the link. So it might not be able to handle the load as well.
The next big question is whether or not it's standards based. While it would be surprising if it used Z39.50, it would be a shame if it didn't use SRW and/or CQL.
Especially as NISO is recommending them in their current 'Metasearch Initiative' -- an industry/academic/government cross sector committee with the major players and interested parties for allowing cross searching of bibliographic databases with other sorts of things.
(ObDisc, member of both SRW Editorial Board and Taskgroup 3 of NMSI)
--Azaroth
If we were to look at another project, say, CDDB, which stores meta-data for CDs (Title, Arist, Track Listing), something not at all unlike storing meta-data for books (bibliographies), you'll note that CDDBs entries are frequently inaccurate, mispelled and just plain wrong.
When it comes down to it, I don't really trust Random Joe to provide accurate trustworthy info. It's not like its like Wikipedia, or anything, which has constant peer review and a clear history.
This would be better because when she reads a new article, she could get the bibliography from someone else, rather than having to type it in herself.
Of course, if she has read so few papers, and does so little writing, that Excel (and Word? Ick!) work for her purposes, then this might be an exercise in gilding lillies.
I use Emacs, with reftex and bibtex, and find that it works far better for my purposes than any of the several wordprocessors I've tried. None of them, including Word and OpenOffice, can equal that combo, with LaTeX for the typesetting. They're just not up to speed, for quality of the output or ease of use.
See what I've been reading.
Next, they'll perfect image search:
A possible inquiry could be: I want to see defiance in the face of insurmountable odds.
As a result Imagester returns images depicting defiance in the face of insurmountable odds.
Seriously, are they offering anything better than standard keyword and author search? What I'd really like to see is such a bibliography database that ranks search results usign a PageRank-like algorithm (as I recall, the idea for PageRank derived from research on citation graphs, so this would bring things full circle).
I'd also like to see Google start parsing publications and indexing them by author, year, and citations. The bibliography databases that I'm familiar with require manual input of new entries; it would be cool if this could be done automatically instead. Of course, there will need to be some interface to correct erroneous entries, and this opens up a large can of worms.
I've been working on a similar idea for news, and as far as I can tell fair use completely applies to this specific idea of yours - education and the arts, unbiased, not for profit.
There are already some sites out there doing something similar like the Media Awareness Project [mapinc.org] which collects and archives research on drug policy. From what I can tell, they only get sued when they get too big, present content with a bias, or try to profit.
I find it hard to believe my little project is the only one out there. We're working on web/p2p jointly, but there are bound to be others, and they'll all probably be open source. So once one good once comes out, we'll see lots of applications of this within research and academic communities.
OK, these p2p apps are awesome, but I see a problem, they each need to maintain their own p2p system(protocol), by forking from another project it or by writing from scratch or they need to piggyback another network...
When will someone sit down, using an open source model ofcourse, and write the 'granddad' p2p protocol? It doesn't have to require everything, just has to be able to support everything... Encryption, hidden routing(not being able to tell who is requesting data vs. who is just passing data along), multiple source download, huge scaling, efficient and distributed search, etc.
This public network could become the defacto to what open source apps work off of. As long as the protocol is the focus(a nice gui as well, but seperate the frontend from the backend), you could use it link to files on your website, or you could have multiple apps(a music/napster like app, a scientific research paper app, a bibliographies app, a usenet discussion thread app) each of them using a common protocol, and routing between them, but each app filters out the noise it doesn't want.
It could be the killer app, it could have every major p2p app migrate to it. Project Gutenberg, Bibster, linuxiso.org, all using a common protocol and network.... *drools*
Doom 3 has been massively pirated this weekend, at record highs. Apparently, it's shaping up to be one of the most pirated games ever. Estimates are that id Software has lost up to 2 million dollars. Activision isn't saying anything at this point. Gamespot and the BBC both have articles on the news. The PC Gamer editor has some words for the pirates in the BBC article. This setback is set to cost Activision and id Software millions. John Carmack is reportedly very unhappy.
I tried to keep a system like that going for a while. It's one thing to be good about saying "Wow, that was a good article, I should fill out the bibliography right now in case I should like to cite it someday." It doesn't take much discipline since it happens roughly once a year. It takes a whole other level of discipline I just don't have to keep filling in those entries for articles I get bored with halfway through, stacks of articles my boss dumps on my desk, articles I read and decide are completely irrelevant to anything I'll ever be interested in, etc.
Nowadays I just use SciFinder or one of the other databases which can export in citation manager friendly format instead of typing in by hand. I'm not sure I see how P2P would make my life any easier. However these are all (SciFinder, SciSearch, ISI to be sure, not so sure about others) for fee databases that require my University to pay a subscription. I'm all for the free exchange of information, especially in the scientific community, so if this facititates it, I'm on board.