Another challenging question from a fellow librarian in the Max Planck Society:
How can I add OpenURL links to a reference list created with EndNote?
That is a tough one! Fact is that EndNote itself is OpenURL enabled, meaning the software can be configured to use a specific link resolver for full text linking and more (see the instructions provided by the IVS-BM for details). But it looks like this feature is not available while generating a bibliography with EndNote. Or at least, I haven’t discovered a trick to export references plus OpenURLs with any built-in means.
However, it is possible to customize existing Output Styles, e.g. by adding a COinS to each entry of a reference list created with this style. I tried it, but found the result sub-optimal (see examples below). The major problem is that EndNote’s Output Style Manager does not support URL-encoding of values and that would be required to generate valid COinS. The OpenURL Referrer extension seems to be gentle enough to accept them nevertheless, but Zotero rejects the import. What a bummer!
Example Bibliography (with COinS*)
Adam, G., Anke, H., Boland, W., & al., e. (2000). Roempp encyclopedia natural products. Stuttgart: Thieme.
Adam, G., Schmidt, J., & Schneider, B. (1999). Brassinosteroids. Progress in the Chemistry of Organic Natural Products, 78, 1-46.
Adam, G., & Schneider, B. (1999). Uptake, transport and metabolism. In A. Sakurai, T. Yokota & S. D. Clouse (Eds.), Brassinosteroids: Steroidal Plant Hormones (pp. 113-136). Tokyo: Springer.
* You don’t see a COinS? Check the corresponding web page for additional information.
COinS isn’t a great way to transfer bibliographic citation information anyway, because of difficulties with including more than one author, with first name and last name seperated.
Isn’t there a better way to get your citations into Zotero, if that’s what you want? Isn’t there some way to get Zotero to import an RIS file that EndNote can export?
And, I’m not a Zotero user, but I wonder if you could then use Zotero to export with OpenURLs included. Maybe the way to get an export from EndNote with an OpenURL is to go through Zotero first.
@Johnathan: Sure, there are better ways to transfer citation information between EndNote and Zotero – and you already mentioned RIS ;). In this scenario EndNote is used to create reference lists for a public homepage. The idea was to enrich the “plain” references by embedding structured metadata – and I believe that COinS is a good standard for doing it. Anyway, there are plenty options to convert EndNote records into a bibliography, but I started by using the built-in export module and that didn’t worked out.
This is an interesting problem, but one which I don’t think EndNote is well cut out for… it would be interesting to see how Zotero handles the same data.
I did strike a problem with the emdash not being encoded properly in EndNote, with their OpenURL requests.
Yeah, that makes sense. I agree that COinS are currently the best way to embed structured metadata suitable for _resolution_ (getting the document). I’m still skeptical of them as structured data for re-import into a citation management utility. (I wish there was an easy conventional way to include RIS inline embedded in HTML, a microformat-like thing for RIS. Maybe some of us need to invent one).
But anyway, if this is a common need your users have, I wonder if it would make sense to write an external utility that took an RIS file and generated HTML with coins. But I guess the problem there would be that you don’t want to have to generate the HTML citation yourself, you want to rely on EndNote to do that. Generating a COinS from RIS is trivial ; generating an HTML representation of a standard human-readable citation format is not.
One thing I want to find the chance to work on is embedding Zotero’s own citation-styling code in a server side app, so I can easily use Zotero’s pretty good logic for generating HTML citations on a server side app. And drop-in update it with new versions of Zotero (and it’s styling templates) when they come out, etc. With something like that, it would be easy to write an app that took an RIS file and generated HTML with human readable citations in the format of choice, plus whatever structured metadata you want to embed.
@Jonathan Rochkind: RIS is only better than COinS if people take the trouble to catalog with RIS thoroughly.
Anyway, since EndNote doesn’t seem to be able to generate proper COinS, an external RIS->COinS/HTML converter tool would be highly appreciated.
I think RDFa is probably a better approach. I’m gently trying to get it included as an optional output mode in CSL processors (like the one in Zotero).
Yes! Zotero HTML exports include reasonably good url-encoded COinS.
While it is not without flaws, it works “O.K.” in Zotero. Zotero doesn’t take advantage of OpenURL resolvers, but if you have a good resolver backed by a database, you could potentially have your reference manager query the resolver with COinS & import better, structured data from the resolver.
I agree with Martin and Bruce re. limitations of RIS. There is still small adoption of good, embeddable RDF & much disagreement as to other potential citation microformats.
If embedding is not a requirement, unAPI is pretty good & you can use it with a richer data exchange format (RDF or MODS XML).
People have played with this a bit. There are citeproc tools written in other languages as well & these may be easier to use server-side. Check the xbiblio list for recent posts on this topic.
Zotero or refbase or a similar tool are probably your best bets. As Jonathan notes, the tricky part is whether it outputs a bibliography style that you want.
@Bruce D’Arcus Providing an export to RDFa via widely used CSL processors is a very good idea (thanks for your work in this context!). Is that somehow related to the Bibliographic Ontology initiative (http://bibliontology.com/)?
@all commentators: Thanks a lot for sharing your ideas and takes – which . If somebody would like to follow-up Rick’s comment regarding citeproc tools: The archive of the xbiblio list is available via http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_name=xbiblio-devel
You may be interested to learn that one of the enhancements in the upcoming April release of RefWorks is the ability to include OpenURL links in a bibliography (which you could output to HTML or other formats); see http://www.refworks-cos.com/feature-release/april2009a.html#2 for details. Another option is to use the RefShare feature to share a folder of references which will show OpenURL links on the shared page; see http://refworks.com/content/news/INC_2009_01_31.asp for details.
The reason I mention it here is that if I am not mistaken Max Planck Society has a RefWorks subscription, so you and your fellow librarian who raised the issue might want to check it out.
Full disclosure – I work for RefWorks-COS as a trainer
@Jason High: Thanks for sharing the information, but the Max Planck Society has no central RefWorks subscription. Some institutes participated in a one year trial, but the trial wasn’t followed up by an institutional license.
#EndNote – sorry, it was not the emdash, it was apostrophe’s in the EndNote OpenURL.
I see Zotero was mentions on this French blog for generating COinS: http://tinyurl.com/d8y7ze looks goot
@Inga: yes, there’s a relationship between the two in that sense that I had a large role in both, and I would advocate using bibo to encode the RDFa.
One of my local librarian colleagues informs me that you can now edit RefWorks output styles to include OpenURL links. Oops, now I see we were talking about EndNote here, not RefWorks. But if RefWorks is doing it, maybe EndNote will come along shortly,especially if customers ask for it and mention that RefWorks does it.
That depends on what you mean by “customers”. For us librarians/IT guys, OpenURL support seems nice, but I still don’t know what a scientist/scholar would use this feature for.