https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=484418
Bug ID: 484418
Summary: Support for searching and adding book citations (e.g.
from Google Books, WorldCat)
Classification: Applications
Product: KBibTeX
Version: 0.10
Platform: Other
OS: Linux
Status: REPORTED
Severity: wishlist
Priority: NOR
Component: Network/online search
Assignee: [email protected]
Reporter: [email protected]
Target Milestone: ---
User story:
I was looking for a lightweight citation and document manager, ideally a native
Qt application. I don't need anything as complicated or heavy as Zotero or
Evernote (my distribution doesn't package Zotero, anyway). I found KBibTeX and
decided to see if it would meet my needs.
Most of the time I'm trying to keep track of books (usually physical copies)
that I've read, and might need to cite in various places - or even just
remember where I might have read something.
As it stands, KBT has a lot of features for importing citations from DOIs or
other sources like JSTOR, but nothing (as far as I can tell) for automatically
creating citations for books using e.g. an ISBN.
I attempted to create citations by searching for ISBNs using the Google Scholar
engine. In some cases the searches just failed because Scholar indexes
articles, not books. In other cases, I was successful in that my searches did
return results, but the resulting citations were missing obvious and important
fields like "Publisher", "Location", and "ISBN", which are used in most
citation styles for books.
-------------
Possible solutions:
* Google Books is probably the easiest source to add because there's an API
for fetching data for ISBNs with no API key required. [1] Downloading a BiBTeX
format citation for a given Google Books ID is also trivial. [2] I'm not sure
about the relative completeness of various catalogues, so WorldCat might have
some books that Google Books lacks.
* WorldCat seems to be a common source of citation data for books. For
example, Citer [3], an open source web based tool for creating citations on
Wikipedia, uses WorldCat as a primary source of data for ISBNs. WorldCat has
search results for ISBN values that KBT could display to the user [4], and the
source HTML code of each page looks pretty easy to scrape.
* Do what I'm doing now, which is attempt to find the exact version of the
book on Google Books manually, download a BibTex citation, open the resulting
file, and copy and paste the citation into KBT. Pretty painful.
[1] https://www.googleapis.com/books/v1/volumes?q=isbn:1493905244
[2]
https://books.google.com/books/download/Ecoregions.bibtex?id=fnG8BAAAQBAJ&output=bibtex
[3] https://github.com/5j9/citer
[4] https://search.worldcat.org/search?qt=wikipedia&q=isbn%3A0444885994
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