Applications!
As the holidays are rapidly approaching, we thought we would give you some real life examples of how great the arXiv API is to share with your family. We knew that you were dreading explaining to Grandma what Atom over HTTP is, and thanks to several intrepid developers you don’t have to! Now you can send her a link to this post and she can discover for herself all the cool things people are already doing with the API.
A Mediawiki Extension by Bill Flanagan
The first in the list came out only a couple of days after the API. OpenWetWare’s Bill Flanagan has extended Mediawiki to enable arXiv magic words. In case you are not familiar with Mediawiki, it is the software that runs Wikipedia, so making an extension to it is extremely interesting given Wikipedia’s popularity.
Magic words are a convenient shortcut when editing a wiki article. Say you want to reference a particular arXiv article in a wiki page. You could manually type in details of the article, or even create a link to an arXiv abstract page. Now with Bill’s extension it is much easier. All you have to do is type something like
ARXID 0711.3008
and Bill’s system will insert a link to more information for you. Of course behind the scenes Bill’s extension is calling the arXiv API which is why we are telling you (and Grandma) about it.
Bookends Reference Manager by Jonathan Ashwell
Jonathan Ashwell of Sonny Software has already integrated an arXiv search into his Bookends reference manager software. If you don’t know Bookends, you should because it can really save you lots of time when you are writing those papers and theses, especially if you are citing a lot of arXiv articles.
Bookends is a reference manager. Let’s say I want to write a paper (to post on the arXiv) and I need to cite several arXiv papers. Most people would typically type in citation information into a BibTex file and reference that file within their Latex manuscript. That means you have to go to arxiv.org, search for papers, and then manually type stuff. That sounds like a lot of work. With Bookends, you can search the arXiv within your reference manager itself. If you find a paper you like, simply import it into your reference library. You can even attach PDF’s to these reference library entries so you don’t have to worry about forgetting where you put that PDF. Then it is just a few clicks to generate a BibTex file containing the papers you want. For the record, Bookends can format citations in a variety of formats, and it can also search over other literature services like PubMed.
Nature Scintilla Search by Alf Eaton
From the Nature blog
Scintilla is an aggregator—of science weblogs, news stories and
publication databases—but it works in a slightly different way from the
existing online RSS readers that cover the whole internet. For a start,
the sources are manually selected, and only related to science, so there
shouldn't be any trouble with spam when searching for stories. Also
there's no 'unread items' count, so you don't have to feel like you have
lots of reading to catch up on. Browse the site, add sources to your
collection, and visit your 'Read' page on Scintilla whenever you're
looking for some juicy science stories to read.
Thanks to Alf, we can add arXiv to the list of publication databases that Scintilla works with. If you are a Scintilla user, this is great news, and if you aren’t, maybe you should be! For more information, visit the Scintilla home page.
And of course we love it when you talk about us. Thanks to the PhysMathCentral blog for keeping track of our progress. As always, comments are welcome, even from Grandma!
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