ADS to BibDesk is an Automator service that allows you to automatically retrieve the bibtex, abstract and PDF of an astronomical journal article published on ADS or arXiv.org and add it to your BibDesk database.
ADS to BibDesk comes in two flavours. The Service version should be used by Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard users working in Safari or other Cocoa applications. A legacy Application version is also available for Mac OS X 10.5 users, and users of non-Cocoa applications (e.g. Firefox).
You can gather papers from many sources. In any browser window or document, select one of the following pieces of text:
- The URL of an ADS or arXiv article page,
- The ADS bibcode of an article (e.g. 1998ApJ...500..525S), or
- the arXiv identifier of an article (e.g. 0911.4956).
Now activate the 'Add to BibDesk' scripts:
- If using the Services version, right-click on the selected text and choose 'Services > Add to Bibdesk'.
- If using the application version, copy the selected text to the clipboard and launch the Add to BibDesk application.
The bibtex and abstract of the article will be copied into your currently-open BibDesk database. The scripts are now empowered to try download the article's PDF from ADS, or alternatively, arXiv. A Growl notification will appear when the import is complete.
Updating pre-prints: From the terminal, run the adsbibdesk python script with the -u option, to automatically update any astro-ph pre-prints that have been recently refereed.
For more details, see the ADS to BibDesk homepage.
ADS to BibDesk can also be run directly from the command line.
Tagged releases are available from the Python Package Index:
pip install adsbibdesk
Alternatively you can always install the bleeding-edge development version:
git clone https://github.com/jonathansick/ads_bibdesk.git
cd ads_bibdesk/
python build.py
cd build/adsbibdesk
python setup.py install
You may need to run the last command with sudo.
Once ADS to BibDesk is installed, you can call it with the same types of article tokens you can launch the Service with, e.g.,
adsbibdesk 1998ApJ...500..525S
A full summary of adsbibdesk commands is available via
adsbibdesk --help
With the command-line ADS to BibDesk, you can ingest a folder of PDFs that originated from ADS into BibDesk. This is great for users who have amassed a literature folder, but are just starting to use BibDesk. This will get you started quickly.
You need the program pdf2json to use
this script. The easiest way to get pdf2json and its dependencies is through
Homebrew, the Mac package manager.
Once homebrew is setup, simply run brew install pdf2json.
To run this workflow,
adsbibdesk -p my_pdf_dir/
where my_pdf_dir/ is a directory containing PDFs that you want to ingest.
Note that this workflow relies on a DOI existing in the PDF. As such, it will not identify astro-ph pre-prints, or published papers older than a few years. Typically the DOI is published on the first page of modern papers. This method was inspired by a script by Dr Lucy Lim.
ADS to BibDesk is built around a single python script adsbibdesk.py, that scrapes arXiv and ADS pages for bibliographic information.
Thus after editing the source file, run the build.py script to update the Automator files and shell scripts in the build/ directory.
Our policy is to not track the built python module/script in the build/adsbibdesk directory (it is ignored). It can easily be built by running build.py.
Further, although we need to track the Automator workflow, we don't need to commit changes to the Python script we embed in it. Thus it may be handy to ignore those changes by running
git update-index --assume-unchanged "build/Add to BibDesk.workflow/Contents/document.wflow"
Copyright 2013 Jonathan Sick, Rui Pereira and Dan-Foreman Mackey
ADS to BibDesk is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
ADS to BibDesk is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with ADS to BibDesk. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.