Hacker News Reader

Comment by aaren | Hacker News Reader

For interest, you can do something like this on the command line using curl. Try these:

    curl -LH "Accept: text/bibliography" "http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0022112061000019"

    curl -LH "Accept: text/bibliography; style=bibtex" "http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0022112061000019"

    curl -LH "Accept: text/bibliography; style=apa" "http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0022112061000019"

My academic life became a lot simpler when I learnt this - now I only need to maintain a database of {cite key: DOI} pairs, rather than a bibtex monster. Yes, I have tried Mendeley et al. and yes, I do prefer scripts that do what I tell them to.

View on HN

For CS I did it almost like that: Typically you write papers in LaTeX which means you need a correct Bibtex entry, and correct means its better be curated by someone else. Since most of the relevant CS publications are in DBLP [1] I wrote a small script that scans missing citation keys in your LaTeX file for actual DBLP keys and automatically builds this into a bibtex file that you can use [2]. If you integrate this command in your regular build cycle for LaTeX using for example latexmk manually maintaining bibtex files is a thing from the past.

[1] http://www.dblp.org/search/

[2] https://github.com/grundprinzip/dblp

Ok, that's pretty awesome. Time to shove this into a Word macro (because, I have to use word :( )

This works great! I looked into doi.org before but I wasn't sure what their ratelimit is. I'm currently using phantomJS and google scholar for DOIs, and I think I might have hit their rate limit already, so I will take a second look at this!

FYI this is CrossRef DOIs, and the data is served by CrossRef. Take a look at our API, e.g. http://api.crossref.org/works/10.5555/12345678 and http://search.crossref.org

Any questions email, us at labs@crossref.org

*which are the kinds of DOI you're likely to be citing, but other Registration Agencies and types of DOIs exist

p.s. I found I had to use 'data.crossref.org' instead of 'dx.doi.org' when I scripted it (python + requests). Not sure why exactly (doi was redirecting to crossref anyway).

How to do it in python in case anyone is wondering:

    import requests
    import json

    url = 'http://data.crossref.org/10.1017/S0022112061000019'
    headers = {'Accept': 'application/citeproc+json'}
    r = requests.get(url, headers=headers)
    meta = json.loads(r.content)
    # meta is a dictionary of metadata, e.g. meta['DOI']

Neat tip: You can just do:

    meta = r.json()

and avoid the json import.

Do you know where I can find the documentation for this API? I got MLA style working, but I can't get Chicago/Turabian style working. Once I get this working, I plan to switch to this method for DOIs. Thanks!

To clarify, this is using Content Negotiation on the DOI API (i.e. sending 'Accepts' headers). These DOIs are CrossRef's, so requesting those formats via content negotiation is getting metadata from CrossRef.

Nevermind - I found it.

Sorry to hijack this reply; for your URL citations, you may want to integrate with the Internet Archive (archive.org) to get/store the snapshot of the URL/URI you're citing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com