Friday, October 28, 2011

Managing publication lists in HTML

As an academic, it's a good idea to maintain a professional website with a list of your publications.  Ideally, this list should include links to where visitors can download the papers (PDFs) and any related code.  In my case, I also maintain a website for my research group that has another publication list. Of course, you need to maintain local reference files with the citation info for your publications (for inclusion in later publications), as well as your CV.

Maintaining all these separate lists can become very tedious, which is probably why most academics' sites are usually out-of-date.  Here's how I automate much of it:

#pub {padding: 5px; border-width: 2px; border-style: none; background-color: #eee4b5; font-size: 1.2em; margin-top: 20px; margin-bottom: 20px;}
#pub a{font-weight: bold; color: #09434e;}
#pub name{font-weight: bold; color: #09434e;}
#pub journal{font-style: italic;}

 

The workflow for adding a new paper to an html bibliography is:

  1. Add the paper in Mendeley.
  2. Export bibtex from Mendeley.
  3. Run Python scripts.
  4. Paste resulting HTML into the appropriate file.

Again, it would be simpler if I could use Bibbase (cutting out steps 2-4).  It's still fairly painless, and it's easy to generate new bibilographic lists or customize the look of existing ones.

1 comment:

  1. I have spent considerable time trying to find a good way to automatically publish my papers on my web site. I have now distilled it down to

    1. Update bibtex file
    2. FTP to web site

    The outcome can be seen at

    http://www.graham-kendall.com/publications/index.php?type=all

    But, in doing this, and another research project I have come across lots of problems with bibtex. See:

    http://graham-kendall.com/blog/?cat=87

    ... which I find frustrating as you would think that we (the scientific community) would have enforced standards in place to underpin one of the most important aspects of the scientific process.

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