Hi Steve, I'm not Petr but I'll try to answer some of your questions. I'm sure others will disagree but I should be somewhere in the right area
First of all think of the entire area of citations, references, etc, as being something like the academic equivalent of an audit trail. Academic writers,policy developers and Uncle Tom Cobbly should provide a link between statements and sources in order that other researchers/readers can check the facts and decide if they agree or disagree with the slant that the author has taken. It is surprisingly easy for two readers to take diametrically opposed views of an article and if the reader does not know where the information came from, they are unable to evaluate the worth of the argument that the current author is making. In some cases if you carefully read a paper one can become suspicious that the current author may not have even read it just done a literature search, considered that the title sounded sexy and tossed in into the article. If you have the time have a look at www.vehicularcyclist.com/casm.doc . My apologies, it was written before I knew about Lyx. Conversely, if the author does not reference a fact or argument then the reader is free (obliged?) to consider it dubious or even invented. I am currently reading a book where the author,blythely states that kindergarten in North America has changed drastically in the last 30 years. He seems to expect his readers to believe him. It may have but I know nothing about kindergarten and see no particular reason to believe him. He provides absolutely no evidence that I can evaluate. When you are in a policy argument that can lead to laws being passed or new medical drugs being approved one wants the decision trail as clear as possible and proper citing is key here. ============================================================== >What's the difference between citations, references and bibliographies? =============================================================== A citation is the 'flag' in the text so, for example ,if I say that "Food additives show this increase (McCann et al. 2007) " you, the reader, can go to the reference list,fi nd the entry for McCann and fellow authors in 2007, read it and decide if the author really understood what McCann et al. were saying and whether or not you agree with them. The reference is a listing that allows you to find the article/book/website, etc that has the information. An example might be something like this: McCann, D.; Barrett, A.; Cooper, A.; Crumpler, D.; Dalen, L.; Grimshaw, K.; Kitchin, E.; Lok, K.; Porteous, L.; Prince, E.; Sonuga-Barke, E.; Warner, J. O. & Stevenson, J. Food additives and hyperactive behaviour in 3-year-old and 8/9-year-old children in the community: a randomised, double-blinded, placebo-controlled trial. Lancet, 2007, 370, 1560-1567. This allows you to track down the paper. I don't work with bibliographies but as I understand it they are reference lists plus. A reference list only contains the references cited in the text. Bibliographies, I believe, do this and may add other relevant reading materials not directly discussed in the article/book but which may be useful or interesting to the reader =============================================================== Assuming citations are individual elements of bibliographies, could you pleaseexplain why Zotero makes adding and maintaining them easier than doing it with bibtex or whatever is normally used in LyX? ================================================================ It is not so much that Zotero makes it easier to add them to LyX but that Zotero makes it much easier to capture a number of different kinds of references directly from the internet which then can be used directly in a paper and then find the blasted things. JabRef for example will get article references from several places (e.g. PubMed) but I still end up cutting and pasting book entries from many library catalogues whereas Zotero currently won't get the articles but will grab references from many libraries, the New York Times, and other places. Currently Bibtex and Zotero complement each other nicely and it is usually easy to import from bibtex to Zotero. The other way around does not work very well. See the thread Zotero to BibTex to Lyx I started yesterday. It is extremely frustrating to know that you have read a paper about X, maybe 3-5 years ago, suddenly realise that it is important to your work and not be able to find it. Zotero seems to be able to help here. Zotoro also has provisions for adding notes (comments etc) tags (say for thematic analysis), allows one to group data (something like JabRef groups ) Altogether Zotero had the potential to make work much easier. It would not be unusual for a writer/researcher to have a reference list of several thousand entries. I believe some groups ( large research groups, law offices, government depts) have professional librarians to help with this but most writers do not. Something that Zotero does as does BibTex is automatically format the citations, references/bibliography entries in the accepted format for the journal/book/ audience for whom you are writing. There are literally thousands of different formats out there and while some may be trivially different some are very, very different, say Chicago Manual of Style vs legal referencing. First of all one wants to be able to reference in the appropriate style for the audience and then, one also wants to be able to easily convert from one style to another if one is using the same set of references in more than one article in different areas. For example one might want to publish in a psychological journal for part of the research and in a medical journal for another part. The citation and referencing styles BibTex or Zotero to manage the styles a change takes perhaps 10-15 seconds. Done manually this could take hours or days, with much consulting of style manuals and heavy cursing. I hope this is of some help. --- On Mon, 12/28/09, Steve Litt <sl...@troubleshooters.com> wrote: > From: Steve Litt <sl...@troubleshooters.com> > Subject: Re: LyZ: LyX plugin for Zotero > To: lyx-users@lists.lyx.org > Received: Monday, December 28, 2009, 1:51 AM > On Monday 28 December 2009 01:26:04 > Petr Šimon wrote: > > Hello, > > I have put together a simple plugin for Zotero that > does little more > > than just inserting citations to LyX documents. It's > been inspired by > > Lytero, which I wanted to improve, but ended up > starting from scratch > > (with some help of Lytero code). Hence the new name. > > > > My ideal for LyX/Zotero plugin was: > > 1. no need to export to bibtex every time I added > articles to Zotero > > 2. automatic updates of the bibtex database > > 3. no need to specify the document and bibtex file > every time I close > > Zotero or LyX > > 4. custom keys > > > > Hope others will find it useful. > > Please see: http://www.klubko.net/?page_id=945 for details and the > > installation file. > > I have tested only on Windows XP, Firefox 3.5.6. It > seems to be working > > quite smoothly, but more testing and some improvement > will follow. > > Please let me know about any problems you encounter > and > > comments/improvement ideas. > > Hi Petr, > > I know nothing about citations. I've used bibliographies in > a couple books, > but that's about it. So it would be a great favor to me > (and I'm probably not > the only one) if you could explain a little about Reference > Management > Software, why you want it, what you do with it, what you > look for in the > Reference Management Software best suited to you? > > What's the difference between citations, references and > bibliographies? > > Assuming citations are individual elements of > bibliographies, could you please > explain why Zotero makes adding and maintaining them easier > than doing it with > bibtex or whatever is normally used in LyX? > > Also, your website has this line: "When you try to add > already existing BibTeX > database to a new document, you will be warned that you are > about to overwrite > the file. Don’t worry and press OK. The file is not > really going to be > overwritten, that’s just standard dialog that I don’t > know how to remove (lazy > to look :) )." > > Normally I don't care about errors in new software, but > this is a particularly > nasty error because it will either: 1) cause people not to > use your software, > or 2) cause people to disregard your software's overwrite > warnings, even when > it's really true. #1 is bad, #2 is disastrous. I'd suggest > you find and fix > that one bug. > > Thanks > > SteveT > > Steve Litt > Recession Relief Package > http://www.recession-relief.US > Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/stevelitt > > __________________________________________________________________ Make your browsing faster, safer, and easier with the new Internet Explorer® 8. Optimized for Yahoo! Get it Now for Free! at http://downloads.yahoo.com/ca/internetexplorer/
