Dear all,
I have been using BibDesk for quite a while now (AFAIR since release
0.73), creating a lot of .bib files that cover pieces of my academic
work (one .bib file per article). These files are also spread across 3
computers (and an SVN repository).
To avoid duplicate bib entries, I would now like to create one large
master file (my estimate is that this will sum up to around 3000
entries). Summertime is probably the time to keep up with some things
and get my computer environment properly running before doing some
writing tasks…
Before doing this (by means of merging in external file groups as
suggested on this list), I have some questions that I hope somebody can
provide answers or actual usage experience for:
- Will BD deal smoothly with 3000+ entries? I am mainly using an 2007
iMac and a G4 PowerBook 1,67 (both with 2gb of RAM).
- Citekeys issue:
Some were generated manually in the old days when either I did not
understand how to autogenerate them or the feature was not yet
implemented. Others, I have autogenerated (using several different
custom formats, stupid me).
As I have used the keys in my .tex sources, these should not change
(obviously). I just tried it, and BibDesk’s "Select duplicate" mechanism
does find duplicate publications that have different citekeys. Great! I
still have to clean those up manually anyway, and achieving a consistent
scheme of cite keys would require reediting old .tex sources. Are there
ways to do that automagically? If not, I’ll probably leave everything as
is since it is rather a problem of cosmetics.
- Autofile issues:
Some of my bibs have papers filed (via Autofile, and some are also still
stored somewhere on the file system of my PowerBook with links in the
deprecated local-url field, but that is the minority of the files).
Unfortunately, to different fixed locations on different computers. What
is the best way to bring these together?
My ideal scenario would be to have a central repository on my university
server that would sync with my workstations to provide offline access as
well. That won’t work, so probably I’ll stick to mounting the university
server (which is no problem from my work computer, but I need a VPN
connection from home).
What will happen if I change the "fixed location" to, say,
"/Volumes/myserver/Papers/" -- can I, say, batch replace the location?
Another Autofile thing is that I once had the idea to divide my bibs and
Autofiled papers between primary and secondary sources by assigning a
document info key and using this in the Autofile local file format
(%i{key}/somegeneratedname). Can I safely remove the "%i{key}/" fragment
without losing the connection between .bib and the actual files?
Probably the "match files" thing is the way to go, but actually I did
never try this. Am I right that the old menu item "consolidate linked
files" has been renamed and reworked to the "Autofile Linked Files" menu
item?
- Duplicates and identification:
For being able to see from which context each publication is coming
from, I would like to assign keywords to all publications in a given
.bib file (using the Add Keyword applescript by Derrick Fay). This does
not prevent otherwise identical entries to be recognised by the "select
duplicates" mechanism,, but are there any other downsides to this approach?
Thanks for an amazing app, and for all your comments!
Stephan
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