Introducing Autocite!

Labmeeting is all about taking information you already have (like the papers you read) and making that information more useful to you by helping you to explore it.

Autocite is the newest tool we’ve created along these lines.  It takes plain text bibliographies and figures out which citations on PubMed the text refers to.  To be concrete, I type in:

Montgomery, MK, S Xu, A Fire (1998)   RNA as a target of double-stranded RNA-mediated genetic interference in Caenorhabditis elegans.    Proc Natl Acad Sci    95: 15502-15507.

which I just lifted out of someone’s CV here, and it gives back:

Montgomery MK, Xu S, Fire A. 1998. “RNA as a target of double-stranded RNA-mediated genetic interference in Caenorhabditis elegans“. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

The great thing about this is that you can apply it in all sorts of ways to making your life easier as a researcher.  If you’re reading a document with a big long bibliography, you can copy and paste the bibliography into Autocite and immediately have a list of links to abstracts and full text for all the articles.  Or, if you have a webpage of your own with a list of your own past published works, you can automatically convert the plain text list into the HTML that you would use to link to the abstracts so that people who read your page can more easily find things out about your work.

We’re excited about Autocite and we’d love to get feedback from everyone who uses it.  Give it a try!

3 Comments

  1. Posted May 13, 2009 at 9:50 pm | Permalink

    I read your Post and pls give me your more information about this.

  2. Martin
    Posted May 20, 2009 at 2:23 am | Permalink

    Works so-so:
    “Lee DM, Schur PH. Clinical utility of the anti-CCP assay in patients with
    rheumatic diseases. Ann Rheum Dis. 2003;62:870-4.” is fine, but
    “VA N N O O R D C , H O O I J K A A S H, VA N D E N
    G O O RBERGH BCM et al.: Diagnostic value of
    anti-cyclic citrullinated peptide antibodies to
    detect rheumatoid arthritis in patients with
    Sjögren’s syndrome. Ann Rheum Dis 2005;
    64: 160-2.” does not resolve
    “Ann Rheum Dis 2005;64: 160-2.” does not work

    “ME Y E R O, LABARRE C, DOUGADOS M e t
    al.: Anticitrullinated protein/peptide antibody
    assays in early rheumatoid arthritis for predicting
    five years radiographic damage. Ann
    Rheum Dis 2003; 62: 120-6.” does resolve wrongly.

    Hmm… still some work to do before I use your service rather than plain copy&past into pubmed

    • Jeremy
      Posted May 20, 2009 at 3:37 pm | Permalink

      The issue here seems to be carriage returns and spacing. There are extra spaces between each of the letters of the names of your authors. When I put in the string:

      MEYER O, LABARRE C, DOUGADOS M et al.: Anticitrullinated protein/peptide antibody assays in early rheumatoid arthritis for predicting five years radiographic damage. Ann Rheum Dis 2003; 62: 120-6.

      it works just fine.


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