Announcing bib2coins – convert BibTeX files to COINS metadata
Recently I was shocked to find that there didn’t seem to be a simple tool which would convert BibTeX files to COINS metadata span tags – so I wrote one!
That sentence probably made no sense to you – so lets go through it in a bit more depth. I use LaTeX to write all of my reports for my PhD, and therefore I keep all of my references in BibTeX format. I also use BibTeX format to keep a list of all of my publications, which I then use to automatically produce a nice listing of my publications on my website. I’ve recently become a big fan of Zotero, which will import references from webpages with a single click. This works for many sites like Google Scholar, Web of Knowledge, Science Direct etc – and I wanted to get the same for my publications page.
Examining the information given on the Zotero Exposing Metadata page suggests that one of the ways to expose this metadata in a HTML page is to use COINS (ContextObjects in Spans). This involves putting a number of strange-looking <SPAN> elements into your HTML page, which Zotero (and various other tools like Mendeley) will then use to automatically add the bibliographic data to their database.
So, how should I create the COINS metadata? Well, you can generate one item at a time using the online generator, or you can export items from Zotero as COINS, but neither of these methods can be automated. I’d really like to have a simple command-line tool that would take a BibTeX file and produce COINS metadata for all of the entries in the file…
So that’s what I created! It’s called bib2coins and it is available on the Python Package Index, to install simply run pip install bib2coins, and it will automatically be placed on your path. You can then just run it as bib2coins bibtexfile.bib and it will print out a load of COINS spans to standard output – just ready for you to pipe into the middle of a HTML file!
The code is fairly simple, and uses a BibTeX parser written by Vassilios Karakoidas combined with my own code to create the COINS spans themselves. It is not finished yet, and currently works well for journals and ‘inproceedings’ items but hasn’t been tested on much else (I haven’t written any books, so I’m not so concerned about creating COINS metadata for them!). However, I will be updating this tool to support more bibliographic item types in the near future.
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This post originally appeared on Robin's Blog.
Categorised as: Academic, bib2coins, Computing, Programming, Python
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