SPIRES bibliography tools - is anyone using these?

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David Seery
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Joined: January 25 2005
Affiliation: University of Sussex
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SPIRES bibliography tools - is anyone using these?

Post by David Seery » August 08 2006

I've been experimenting with the SPIRES email service (http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/hep ... nbib.shtml) which generates a bibliography or bibtex database automatically, from a TeX source.

Is anyone using this successfully? Perhaps owing to doing something wrong, I only get blank responses from the robot, even with the example LaTeX paper on their site.

Sarah Bridle
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Affiliation: University College London (UCL)
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SPIRES bibliography tools - is anyone using these?

Post by Sarah Bridle » August 11 2006

Hi David,
Thanks so much for pointing this out. This is just the sort of thing I've been wanting to use. The fact that it finds the journal refs from the astro-ph number alone is vv handy, and I like the way I can just send my latex and I don't have to bother installing anything on my computer.

I just tried it out by citing a random paper at the top of the latex for an existing paper:

Code: Select all

extra citation \cite{astro-ph/0403384}
Then emailed it to the address specified, with the latex in the main body of the email ("generate" on the subject line). It emailed me back immediately with the relevant reference:

Code: Select all

\bibitem{astro-ph/0403384}
  D.~J.~Bacon {\it et al.},
  %``Evolution of the Dark Matter Distribution with 3-D Weak Lensing,''
  Mon.\ Not.\ Roy.\ Astron.\ Soc.\  {\bf 363}, 723 (2005)
  [arXiv:astro-ph/0403384].
  %%CITATION = ASTRO-PH 0403384;%%
plus some comments about how it didn't find all my other refs (because they were not in the right format i.e., as explained on their web page, it isn't going to know the reference for \cite{bridle03}).

I pasted it into my bibliography and it appeared fine in the dvi and pdf.

One thing I would ideally like improved is that I want to cite MNRAS as "MNRAS" not "Mon.\ Not.\ Roy.\ Astron.\ Soc.\ " and I can't see a way to automatically switch that ("\mnras") would be good too. But can search and replace later I guess.
Also, the format of the name isn't as I wanted: i.e. wanted "Bacon, D.", not "D. J. Bacon".
My latex already specifies \usepackage{natbib} so shouldn't that give the robot some clues as to how it should look.
Would be interested to know if anyone has a fix for this.

Thanks,
Sarah

David Seery
Posts: 6
Joined: January 25 2005
Affiliation: University of Sussex
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SPIRES bibliography tools - is anyone using these?

Post by David Seery » August 11 2006

It seems like a good service, and it's useful to know that it works - presumably I'm doing something wrong.

I tried emailing the simple citation you suggested to the robot:

Code: Select all

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\begin{document}
A citation test: \cite{astro-ph/0403384}.
\end{document}
Unfortunately when I do this, the response I get back from the robot is just empty:

Code: Select all

% Save this file and include it in your paper as the bibliography
% or cut and paste directly into your LaTeX
I agree that the format isn't always what you expect. I was trying to use it with bibtex in order to have some more control over the way the citation appears - maybe that would be an option? Unfortunately this wouldn't help with abbreviations for journal titles, though.

Sarah Bridle
Posts: 144
Joined: September 24 2004
Affiliation: University College London (UCL)
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SPIRES bibliography tools - is anyone using these?

Post by Sarah Bridle » August 11 2006

How bizzare.
I cut and paste only your latex into an email to [Log in to view email] with "generate" in the subject line, and got back exactly the below:

Code: Select all

% Save this file and include it in your paper as the bibliography
% or cut and paste directly into your LaTeX

\bibitem{astro-ph/0403384}
  D.~J.~Bacon {\it et al.},
  %``Evolution of the Dark Matter Distribution with 3-D Weak Lensing,''
  Mon.\ Not.\ Roy.\ Astron.\ Soc.\  {\bf 363}, 723 (2005)
  [arXiv:astro-ph/0403384].
  %%CITATION = ASTRO-PH 0403384;%%
um, the only difference I can think of is our email addresses, and maybe mail programs.. !?!?

Antony Lewis
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Joined: September 23 2004
Affiliation: University of Sussex
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Re: SPIRES bibliography tools - is anyone using these?

Post by Antony Lewis » August 11 2006

Why not use Spires bibtex items instead - see

http://cosmocoffee.info/viewtopic.php?t=304

This way the bibtex style file will give you correct formatting, and also tags are much more helpful than raw arxiv numbers. The MNRAS style file linked in the above topic will convert Mon. Not. .. to MNRAS for you.

One thing that might be useful to add (to cosmocoffee?) would be a script that gets Spires bibtex info, but if the journal ref is missing (Spires is only about ~95% complete?) instert the missing info from an ADS search instead (but using nice Spires name tags rather than ADS mess).

Sarah Bridle
Posts: 144
Joined: September 24 2004
Affiliation: University College London (UCL)
Contact:

SPIRES bibliography tools - is anyone using these?

Post by Sarah Bridle » August 11 2006

I see the other thread. Unfortunately I don't know enough about SPIRES to know how to use it to do what I wanted.

In particular, where to you get your original bib entry:

Code: Select all

@Article{Lewis:2005tp, 
     author    = "Lewis, Antony", 
     title     = "Lensed CMB simulation and parameter estimation", 
     eprint    = "astro-ph/0502469", 
     SLACcitation  = "%%CITATION = ASTRO-PH 0502469;%%" 
}
from?

Sorry, no doubt it should be obvious to me from the SPIRES website, but I just looked and couldn't fathom it, so perhaps I'm not the only one.

I can see that the SPIRES automated bibliography generator could produce something for you, but to do that it would have to understand Lewis:2005tp. How does it do that? (What's the code for these tags?).
Thanks.

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