Sonny Software

I just noticed that Bookends is now included in the list of reference manager formats available from several major science journals, including Science.

Now if they'd all just start using unicode and actually abide by the RIS format.

Yes, I noticed that some time ago too. Also, it really seems to improve the import data – DOI numbers, for example, get imported much more reliably now, and do not need cleaning up after import. A big improvement!

Thanks.

We did work with one group that supports many journals to modify their RIS output slightly to work better with Bookends. As for the unicode -- are you sure whatever journal you are referring to isn't ouputting UTF-8? Don't forget, in Bookends you have to set the import text encoding (File menu) so that Bookends correctly interprets what it receives.

Jon
Sonny Software

Hi Jon, I figured there was one group that was doing a number of those, as many journals have the same sidebar with the same options and the same file naming conventions.

Re UTF-8, the worst offender was the American Geophysical Union who used a Western ISO formatting. It turns out that since very recently, Wiley is now handling this for them, and they are now using unicode.

I don't know if you recall, but I was setting up bookends server on a mac server for students to submit references for our group database. I had a php form that allowed the uploading of multiple ris files. So the students would just drop in all the ones they'd gathered, all at once. AGU's lack of unicode was a huge problem, essentially preventing batch uploading.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1029/2009PA001740

Now that link redirects to Wiley (instead of AGU's page). Prior to that, upon import of the ris file, all those accented characters in the title would be mojibake'd, and all the symbols in the abstract (em dash, degree sign, etc., would be imported as html entities.