How Do You Generate/Obtain The Citation Block From A Given Paper?

Question

[Pascal]

Hi all.

Whenever you need to cite a paper/letter/article/etc. in your "references" section, how do you obtain the corresponding citation block ? Such as the following block for instance:

"Quinlan, A. R. et al. Genome-wide mapping and assembly of structural variant breakpoints in the mouse genome. Genome Res. 20, 623–635 (2010)."

My strategy has been so far to look for another paper that cites and copy and paste the citation block but very often this is not that easy and I end up "building" myself the citation text :-(

Is there any web service ? tool ?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

[Simon Cockell]

There are many, many reasons why you shouldn't be doing this. It is error-prone, messy and most of all, it makes unnecessary work for yourself.

Zotero and Mendeley are both freely available, cross-platform tools that will let you scrape the metadata of a paper in various ways, and insert citations in text as you write. They will then build the bibliography for you when you are done, in any one of a number of formats. Just follow the instructions you will find at the links above.

Answer 2

[Fabian Bull]

I am shocked nobody has mentioned JabRef. It is a powerful reference manager written in Java.

Why I like it:

1. Export to BibTex, HTML and DocBook
2. Search for articles in major databases (pubmed...)
3. Easy to use
4. Portable (works on any OS).

I absolutely encourage everybody to try it out. Its worth its weight in gold.

Answer 3

[Cjt]

Usually, this work is done by a citation manager. Storing your papers in such a database also allows you to select the different different styles which are requested by different journals. I recommend to have a look at zotero and jabref which both are freeware. A full list of programs can be found here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_reference_management_software

Answer 4

[Pierre Lindenbaum]

If you manage your articles with zotero or endnote, it can format the references for you. Another way is to use a xslt stylesheet. For example:

[HTML]
[HTML]
[HTML]
[HTML]
</xsl:template>


[HTML]
[HTML]
[HTML]
[HTML] </xsl:text>
[HTML]
[HTML] </xsl:text>
[HTML]
[HTML], </xsl:text>
[HTML]
[HTML] (</xsl:text>
[HTML]
[HTML]) </xsl:text>
[HTML]
</xsl:text>
</xsl:template>

[HTML]
[HTML]
[HTML], </xsl:text>
[HTML]
[HTML]. </xsl:text>
</xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

Example:

xsltproc --novalid jeter.xsl "http://eutils.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/eutils/efetch.fcgi?db=pubmed&retmode=xml&id=20308636"

Quinlan, AR. Genome-wide mapping and assembly of structural variant breakpoints in the mouse genome. Genome Res. 20, 623-35 (2010)

Answer 5

[Gareth Palidwor]

In Google Scholar, you can get the citation block by setting the Bibliography Manager in Scholar Preferences; this will provide the citation link on the search link in an importable format (BibTex, EndNote, etc.).

[Pascal]

Good one ! Thank you.

Answer 6

[Giovanni M Dall'Olio]

Quick and dirty method:

• go to pubmed
• select the papers
• select Display Settings -> Summary (Text)

Of course, the best is to use a Reference Manager such as Zotero or Mendeley.