“Avalanche control” in scientific literature: A role for informatics
In “We Must Stop the Avalanche of Low-Quality Research,” it is claimed that much of the scientific research literature published recently is “redundant, inconsequential, and outright poor” and that “research has swelled in recent decades, filling countless pages in journals and monographs.” “Countless” is intended in a negative sense here. No argument is provided for the first claim, unless the claims about frequency of citation—generally very low, if at all, for any paper in the literature—are to be taken as an argument that recent literature is poor in quality. It does seem clear that the authors believe that there is too much literature, and it seems to me that their claims and arguments that there is too much literature might be just as strong if it weren’t paired with the argument that the literature is generally low in quality.
Taking a larger view, the problem is probably worse than the “Avalanche” authors suggest. A prominent case in point: the Biodiversity Heritage Library, whose holdings amount at present to 30,512,292 pages in 80,976 volumes, is growing daily, and more and more libraries are joining the project, including those in Europe and the Pacific rim. (Perhaps the “Avalanche” authors would find this reassuring. Back in the good old days, when men were real men (and women didn’t do science), only what was worth reading was published, and everyone read it.) Nonetheless, finding works relevant to a given topic is difficult and will become more so.
BibDesk 1.5.2 released
A new version of BibDesk, the bibliographic reference manager for users of BibTeX on OS X with extensions for use with word processing software, is now available. Visit http://bibdesk.sourceforge.net/, or use the “Check for updates” menu item from within BibDesk itself.
Many thanks to contributors to the bibtex-users mailing list, who, as usual, tested nightly builds, proposed and tested new features, and identified and help kill bugs. Those wanting to join the mailing list are invited to visit the BibDesk home page for more information. Scroll down to “Helping” and “Information” for links.
Release notes are as follows:
BibTeX at the Darwin Manuscripts Project and BHL
Poking around the Biodiversity Heritage Library Tools page, I came across this question from the FAQ:
Question: What is the BibTex format that I see as a download option?
BibTex (http://www.bibtex.org/) is a common format for citations/references and is supported by all the major software vendors (EndNote, RefWorks, Zotero, Biblio). This functionality that lets a user view & export a BibTex file for any title, including its items, from the bibliography page, as in this example:
http://beta.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/1102
BHL is also going to make this format available for download alongside our custom data exports, such that users can download a BibTex file
that contains 1) all the *titles* in BHL including links to each, and 2) all the *items* in BHL (each volume) along with links. We need this export to move title-level metadata from the BHL portal to the article repository, so thought we might as well make the file available for others to use.
In effect, this would put BHL titles & volumes in a format easily understood by existing reference management applications.
When deciding whether our big database of works about evolution at the Darwin Manuscripts Project would use Endnote or BibTeX managed by way of BibDesk, I opted for BibTeX—a smart decision, if I do say so myself. It’s served us well in the many years that we’ve been using it, and it looks like it will continue to be useful. Nelson Beebe is developing (or has completed development) on some scripts to represent BibTeX databases in my SQL tables. He provides some useful links to related software tools which are needed as adjuncts to his scripts. In a paper in TUG (forthcoming? in vol 30, issue 1, Nov 2009), he explains a little bit about BibTeX, relational databases, and what’s involved in representing a .bib file as a relational database.
If anyone out there’s had experience creating relational databases from .bib files, feel free to comment on this post, or to let me know how I can contact you to ask questions and listen to any tips, warnings, etc. you might have.
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