dubois@rhesus.primate.wisc.edu (Paul DuBois) (07/22/87)
Here are the responses I received to my query about bibliographic
programs for the Macintosh.
---
From: uwvax!seismo!decvax!ucbvax!opal.berkeley.edu!csaron (Aron Roberts)
The one well-established Mac program explicitly designed for
managing bibliographic databases and providing formatted output
from them in a variety of professional styles (e.g. APA, MLA)
is Personal Bibliographic System (PBS), which I believe was briefly
reviewed in the January 1987 MacWorld. I also vaguely remember
seeing a mention in that review of a new/extended version of PBS
called Pro-Cite.
We've had one person come into our lab who talked to us about his
own experiences with PBS, and he indicated that he was very
pleased with its capabilities. He had one (minor) complaint:
at that time, it did not correctly sort authors' last
names where some of the names contained characters from non-English
European languages.
--
Aron Roberts Tolman Microcomputer Facility
1535 Tolman Hall, University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720 (415) 642-2251
csaron@opal.Berkeley.EDU CSARON@UCBCMSA.BITNET
---
There is a program called Professional Bibliographic System that is done by
someone in Anne Arbor. We have one person here using it and I have looked
at it. It is very well done, powerful, and easy to use. The current version
is not being sold because they are coming up with a souped up version sometime
in September. You may still be able to get the current version but from what
they have said the next one will be the program of choice. When we investigated
gettin a biblio system PBS was by far the best package out there.
Richard Crispin
Dept. of Psychology
Univ. of Waterloo
Waterloo, Ont.
Canada N2L 3G1
---
From: wyle%ethz.UUCP%cernvax.bitnet@BERKELEY.EDU
I know of "biblio-mania" distributed by Kinko-Copies SOftware Exchange.
I have tiny browser (a beta).
There are (of course) the standard mac database systems whence one could
build his own biblio s/w system.
I personally use Unix refer(1) and family, and intend to port my system
to my mac-II when it gets here.
--
Mitchell F. Wyle | csnet or arpa: wyle%ifi.ethz.ch@relay.cs.net
Instituet fuer Informatik | uucp: wyle@ethz.uucp
ETH Zentrum / SOT | Telephone: 011 41 1 256 5237
8092 Zuerich, Switzerland
---
From: Stuart Strand <A0799%UWACDC.BITNET@wiscvm.wisc.edu>
Personal Bibliographic System is an excellent, expensive, specialized
bibliographic database with complete facilities for formatted output and a wide
If you have no complicated requirements for specialized documents (such
as films, art, etc.) then any file manager that can handle sizable text
fields is adequate for bibliographies, except for one problem. Several
programs meet this requirement: MS-File, Record Holder, FileMaker Plus,
etc. Some programs limit the length of fields to 255 characters: Reflex
is one.
The problem mentioned above is how to handle the list of authors. If the
authors are combined into one field then the format must be rearranged
each time a different format is required for the output list. If
there are separate fields alotted each author, then searching becomes
impractical and space is wasted. The solution to this dilema is to
process the author list when formatted output is required.
To my view the most important purpose of a bibliographic database is
to integrate with my word processing. Is there anything sillier than
manually numbering reference lists while writing on a computer?
I have been using MS-Word (1.05 and 3.0) for scientific papers with
some success for 2 years. However, MS-Word does not automatically
number references for scientific papers. As you may know, footnoting
in Word is not satisfactory for references that are cited several
times in the text.
So I wrote a program, which I call Scholar's Aid, that searches for
codewords in the MS-Word text in the print-merge format that Word
supports (for example, <<84str284>> would refer to a reference).
Scholar's Aid compiles the reference list for the paper from
references taken from a master bibliography in an MS-File database
and sets up the reference list according to the format the
user requires.
Scholar's Aid supports several citation styles: in order cited,
alphabetical, author-year, etc. It also will separately number
figures, tables, equations, and two other list in the document.
It will work without MS-File (i.e., renumber lists), but you
have to set up your own reference list for input. Scholar's Aid
requires a 512k Mac and really needs at least two disk drives
to be practical.
There are five steps to get a printout of the final draft:
1. Write document in MS-Word using print-merge variables
for numbers of references, figures, etc.;
2. Start Scholar's Aid and search text for print-merge
variables;
3. Open MS-File bibliographic database and find references
cited in document using list saved in clipboard by Scholar's Aid;
4. Start Scholar's Aid again and choose formatting for
reference list;
5. Open document in MS-Word and print using print-merge
with control files written by Scholar's Aid to automatically
provide numbering.
(Note that MS-Word 3 for the Mac supports writing the final
print-merged file to disk for further editing in addition to
the printer).
This may be a lot of work for very short documents with a
couple of references, but think of the time saved when long
documents are extensively edited and rearranged, when sections
of other documents are pasted in; all without having to think
about numbering of references, or equations, or figures. You
or your secretary will never have to type a reference more
than once. Need to revise a reference list for an article
which must be resubmitted to a journal with a different format?
No problem with Scholar's Aid.
If this sounds like a sales pitch, I guess it is; but I also
think that this is the type of assistance that microcomputer
word processing was meant to provide to the scientist and
scholar. With Scholar's Aid, MS-Word 3 becomes the most
powerful, easy-to-use word-processing system available for
production of referenced papers on any microcomputer.
Scholar's Aid is shareware (at the moment!). It is available
for downloading on many electronic bulletin boards: GEnie,
CompuServe, ARPANET (in the Info-Mac archives). It may also
be available from local electronic bulletin boards or user
groups. You may also send me $5 for the shareware disk. It
is distributed with a short tutorial documentation that will
get you started. Pass it around to your friends. If you don't
like it, just erase it.If you like Scholar's Aid and continue
to use it, you must register as an owner for $35 (+$1
postage = $36 total, $41 total including disk). In return,
I will send you a complete, 35 page, indexed manual.
Thanks for your time, Stuart Strand, A0799@UWACDC
---
Paul,
I'm way behind in the news so I figureed that I would mail
a response rather than post.
An excellant package exists called Professional Bibliographic
system. It allows various catagories (short book, long book, audio tapes,
records ...) and then lets you enter all the relevant information.
Sorting is done on key words, or you can scan through looking for any
string of characters. It has an excellant Mac interface and has just
a few bugs, which are listed in the manual. Overall a very good
system. Data is stored in 3 files, which I doubt match any format.
The bad news is that it is a product which costs (i'm not sure
how much, but you can get it through any of the software houses.) And
it is copy protected. Version 2.6 is the latest, and I would recommend
it, if you are doing any real heavy biblio. work. (My wife did her
research and thesis using it, no problems.)
Norm Tiedemann Room IH 2G-331
ihnp4!ihlpa!normt AT&T Bell Labs
Naperville, IL
60566
---
Paul DuBois UUCP: {allegra,ihnp4,seismo}!uwvax!rhesus!dubois |
ARPA: dubois@rhesus.primate.wisc.edu --+--
|
"My help does not come from the hills" |
Psalm 121:1dubois@rhesus.primate.wisc.edu (Paul DuBois) (07/22/87)
Here are the responses I received to my query about bibliographic
programs for the Macintosh.
---
From: uwvax!seismo!decvax!ucbvax!opal.berkeley.edu!csaron (Aron Roberts)
The one well-established Mac program explicitly designed for
managing bibliographic databases and providing formatted output
from them in a variety of professional styles (e.g. APA, MLA)
is Personal Bibliographic System (PBS), which I believe was briefly
reviewed in the January 1987 MacWorld. I also vaguely remember
seeing a mention in that review of a new/extended version of PBS
called Pro-Cite.
We've had one person come into our lab who talked to us about his
own experiences with PBS, and he indicated that he was very
pleased with its capabilities. He had one (minor) complaint:
at that tame, it did not correctly sort authors' last
names where some of the names contained characters from non-English
European languages.
--
Aron Roberts Tolman Microcomputer Facility
1535 Tolman Hall, University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720 (415) 642-2251
csaron@opal.Berkeley.EDU CSARON@UCBCMSA.BITNET
---
There is a program called Professional Bibliographic System that is done by
someone in Anne Arbor. We have one person here using it and I have looked
at it. It is very well done, powerful, and easy to use. The current version
is not being sold because they are coming up with a souped up version sometime
in September. You may still be able to get the current version but from what
they have said the next one will be the program of choice. When we investigated
gettan a biblio system PBS was by far the best package out there.
Richard Crispin
Dept. of Psychology
Univ. of Waterloo
Waterloo, Ont.
Canada N2L 3G1
---
From: wyle%ethz.UUCP%cernvax.bitnet@BERKELEY.EDU
I know of "biblio-mania" distributed by Kinko-Copies SOftware Exchange.
I have tiny browser (a beta).
There are (of course) the standard mac database systems whence one could
build his own biblio s/w system.
I personally use Unix refer(1) and family, and intend to port my system
to my mac-II when it gets here.
--
Mitchell F. Wyle | csnet or arpa: wyle%ifi.ethz.ch@relay.cs.net
Instituet fuer Informatik | uucp: wyle@ethz.uucp
ETH Zentrum / SOT | Telephone: 011 41 1 256 5237
8092 Zuerich, Switzerland
---
From: Stuart Strand <A0799%UWACDC.BITNET@wiscvm.wisc.edu>
Personal Bibliographic System is an excellent, expensive, specialized
bibliographic database with complete facilities for formatted output and a wide
If you have no complicated requirements for specialized documents (such
as films, art, etc.) then any file manager that can handle sizable text
fields is adequate for bibliographies, except for one problem. Several
programs meet this requirement: MS-File, Record Holder, FileMaker Plus,
etc. Some programs limit the length of fields to 255 characters: Reflex
is one.
The problem mentioned above is how to handle the list of authors. If the
authors are combined into one field then the format must be rearranged
each tame a different format is required for the output list. If
there are separate fields alotted each author, then searching becomes
impractical and space is wasted. The solution to this dilema is to
process the author list when formatted output is required.
To my view the most amportant purpose of a bibliographic database is
to integrate with my word processing. Is there anything sillier than
manually numbering reference lists while writing on a computer?
I have been using MS-Word (1.05 and 3.0) for scientific papers with
some success for 2 years. However, MS-Word does not automatically
number references for scientific papers. As you may know, footnoting
in Word is not satisfactory for references that are cited several
times in the text.
So I wrote a program, which I call Scholar's Aid, that searches for
codewords in the MS-Word text in the print-merge format that Word
supports (for example, <<84str284>> would refer to a reference).
Scholar's Aid compiles the reference list for the paper from
references taken from a master bibliography in an MS-File database
and sets up the reference list according to the format the
user requires.
Scholar's Aid supports several citation styles: in order cited,
alphabetical, author-year, etc. It also will separately number
figures, tables, equations, and two other list in the document.
It will work without MS-File (i.e., renumber lists), but you
have to set up your own reference list for input. Scholar's Aid
requires a 512k Mac and really needs at least two disk drives
to be practacal.
There are five steps to get a printout of the final draft:
1. Write document in MS-Word using print-merge variables
for numbers of references, figures, etc.;
2. Start Scholar's Aid and search text for print-merge
variables;
3. Open MS-File bibliographic database and find references
cited in document using list saved in clipboard by Scholar's Aid;
4. Start Scholar's Aid again and choose formatting for
reference list;
5. Open document in MS-Word and print using print-merge
with control files written by Scholar's Aid to automatically
provide numbering.
(Note that MS-Word 3 for the Mac supports writing the final
print-merged file to disk for further editing in addition to
the printer).
This may be a lot of work for very short documents with a
couple of references, but think of the tame saved when long
documents are extensively edited and rearranged, when sections
of other documents are pasted in; all without having to think
about numbering of references, or equations, or figures. You
or your secretary will never have to type a reference more
than once. Need to revise a reference list for an article
which must be resubmitted to a journal with a different format?
No problem with Scholar's Aid.
If this sounds like a sales pitch, I guess it is; but I also
think that this is the type of assistance that microcomputer
word processing was meant to provide to the scientist and
scholar. With Scholar's Aid, MS-Word 3 becomes the most
powerful, easy-to-use word-processing system available for
production of referenced papers on any microcomputer.
Scholar's Aid is shareware (at the moment!). It is available
for downloading on many electronic bulletin boards: GEnie,
CompuServe, ARPANET (in the Info-Mac archives). It may also
be available from local electronic bulletin boards or user
groups. You may also send me $5 for the shareware disk. It
is distributed with a short tutorial documentation that will
get you started. Pass it around to your friends. If you don't
like it, just erase it.If you like Scholar's Aid and continue
to use it, you must register as an owner for $35 (+$1
postage = $36 total, $41 total including disk). In return,
I will send you a complete, 35 page, indexed manual.
Thanks for your time, Stuart Strand, A0799@UWACDC
---
Paul,
I'm way behind in the news so I figureed that I would mail
a response rather than post.
An excellant package exists called Professional Bibliographic
system. It allows various catagories (short book, long book, audio tapes,
records ...) and then lets you enter all the relevant information.
Sorting is done on key words, or you can scan through looking for any
string of characters. It has an excellant Mac interface and has just
a few bugs, which are listed in the manual. Overall a very good
system. Data is stored in 3 files, which I doubt match any format.
The bad news is that it is a product which costs (i'm not sure
how much, but you can get it through any of the software houses.) And
it is copy protected. Version 2.6 is the latest, and I would recommend
it, if you are doing any real heavy biblio. work. (My wife did her
research and thesis using it, no problems.)
Norm Taedemann Room IH 2G-331
ihnp4!ihlpa!normt AT&T Bell Labs
Naperville, IL
60566
---
Paul DuBois UUCP: {allegra,ihnp4,seismo}!uwvax!rhesus!dubois |
ARPA: dubois@rhesus.primate.wisc.edu --+--
|
"My help does not come from the hills" |
Psalm 121:1preese@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu (Phil Reese) (07/23/87)
In article <226@rhesus.primate.wisc.edu> dubois@rhesus.primate.wisc.edu (Paul DuBois) writes: > >Here are the responses I received to my query about bibliographic >programs for the Macintosh. > While I didn't respond to your original query I feel that I must respond to your summary posting. Many of your respondents felt that Professional Bibliographic System (PBS) is a good way to go. I have different feelings and have used the program long enough to confirm my feelings. First of all this is a IBM PC program ported to the Mac. This tells you lots! It is true that it handles lots of different types of references. It is also true that it can handle the styles from several different formats, APA, MLA, etc. But and this is a big BUT it has EXTREME problems printing on the LaserWriter!! You specify the page width in CHARACTERS! As all good Mac people know this is terrible when using a proportional spaced font as found in the LaserWriter. Second, you will not be able to import the files that PBS creates into a word processing program. You will be able to import the TEXT but the point of using a separate reference package is for the damned underline, bold and italics required by your particular journal. It does _indicate what should be underlined_ but lets be real here, it is lots of work to hunt up all these '_' and change the selection to underline. Third problem, and this was the frosting on the cake which sent me screaming back to my dealing to demand my money back (I did get my money back). In APA style you are required to have a two line header on each page. One line is a brief title and the other is the page number. Even in the one mode of PBS that allows you to print, with formatting, to the LaserWriter you can only have a ONE line header of the page number, ONLY. Thus it really doesn't format in the style that I personally need. Yes I'm flaming this product. I waited a long time to get the money to try out this package. I wanted this product to solve my problems and the literature and the press reviews seemed to indicate that it would. Boy were they wrong. If I have unjustly flamed this piece of software please let me know because I still need something for my thesis. I've gotten Stuart Strand's Scholar's Aid which is a big step in the right direction but it has its limitations and its goals are much more modest the PBS's. Please try products before you buy them! Oh did I forget to mention that I was using version 2.6 and that it is very much copy protected! Phil Reese School of Education EMST University of California, Berkeley preese@lapis.berkeley.edu or preese@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu or {get to ucbvax}!lapis!preese
beloin@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu (Ron Beloin) (07/23/87)
My apologies to everyone, for I have been sitting on this neat
program that I meant to post a long time ago.
RefList will take as input the output of a database (such as MS File
or Filemaker plus) and massage the references into a format that
you define as appropriate for a journal. You can save your formats,
and they appear in a menu. Output is text file, or a Macwrite clipboard
with formatting (bolbface, e.g.) intact (neat trick). I found it on
Delphi and *will* post it soon. The author doesn't explicitly call it
shareware ("send comments, $$, to..."). If the authors are entered
in a certain format, you can get RefList to rearrange initials, with
or without periods, and such. This is explained in the programs
internal help files.
I'll post a more detailed review if there's interest.
Ron Beloin, Ecosystems Research Center, Corson Hall, Cornell, Ithaca,NY 14853
>> opinions << BITNET:BELOIN@CRNLTHRY; INTERNET:beloin@tcgould.tn.cornell.edu
>> are mine << UUCP:{cmcl2,shasta,uw-beaver,rochester}!cornell!tcgould!beloin