Hello Biblio-Developers, I'm a researcher in natural sciences and I have been using bibliographis software for a several years now, startig with the first version of Reference Manager, recently switching to EndNote (with some regrets), but I have also been testing several share/freeware programs. My expectations are rather humble, so most programs would do most things I like them to, why I got stuck with EndNote is rather a problem of easy compatibility with colleagues databases. I have read the basic papers on the web page of the bibliographis project and I have not much to add (well, there are always details on a which list .... :-), however there is one thing I would find immensely useful and have to date not found in any program I tested. And this is hierarchical keywords Let me explain with some example from my subject : - you might have several references in your list that treat different tree species : oak, beech, pine, spruce. now two of these are deciduous (oak , beech) and two are coniferes (pine, spruce), and all of them are forest trees. What I would like a bibliographic program able to do is to look up the keyword "beech" in a thesaurus (that the user created personally for his keywords) and find that its a deciduous and a tree. With the effect that I will add to the references the keywords for beech, oak etc. and when I search for "deciduous" I will find all articles concerning beech and oak and when I search for "tree" I will find all references with keywords "oak", "beech", "pine", "spruce". Basically this consists in linking keywords unidirectionally with one another. However also linking bidirectionally is (or even more) important : same example : in one reference concerning oaks I type "oak" as reference, in another i might type "Quercus", which is the latin name for oaks; When I want to search for references concerning oaks, I always need to remember that there were two possible ways to code the keyword for this reference and search both. With this simple example this might seem not a difficult problem, in a conventional program I just need to do a search of "oak" OR "quercus". However the problem is that in a scientific reference list that is used for bibliographic work (that is not only "citing" but mainly searching), there will be many keywords as example one of my main reference data bases has about 2000 references abd nearly 3000 keywords). Many of these keywords will be synonymous and its easy not to remember one of the synonyms in a search and thus not finding certain articles. Therefore I would appreciate much if the keyword database of the bibliographic project could have the ability to be relational so that one could easily link uni o bi directionally several keywords.
I would be happy to discuss this more with anybody who has any ideas on this subject. Cheerio Oliver Brendel _________________________________________________________ Oliver Brendel UMR Ecologie et Ecophysiologie Forestiere INRA - Centre de Nancy 54280 Champenoux France [EMAIL PROTECTED] TEL 0033/383/394041 ext4201 FAX /394069 --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
