BibGlimpse: The case for a light-weight reprint manager in distributed literature research

BMC Bioinformatics

Table 1 Feature comparison

	Management of personal collections	Full-text search	Bibliography-PDF match automated	Personal annotations	Shared collections	Approximate search patterns	Search with synonyms	Index browsing	Ease of I/O with external tools¹⁰	Free use or open-source	Requirements
BibGlimpse	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No	Yes/Yes	Yes¹¹	Bash, Perl, Apache
Abstracting services
PubMed	Prt¹	No	Prt³	No	No	No	Prt	Yes	No/Yes	Yes	Web
ISI Web of	Prt¹	No	No	No	No	No	No	Yes	No/Yes	No	Web
Science Search engine
Google Scholar	No	Yes²	Prt³	No	No	No	No	No	No/No	Yes	Web
Reference managers
EndNote	Yes	No	No⁴	Yes	No	No	No	Prt	No/Yes	No	Win/Mac
RefBase	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes	No	No	Yes⁹	No/Yes	Yes	XAMPP¹²
iPapers	Yes	Yes	No⁵	Yes	No	No	No	No	No/Yes	Yes	Mac
Social bookmarking
CiteULike	Yes	No	No⁶	Prt⁷	Yes	No	No	Tags	No/Prt	Yes	Web
Connotea	Yes	No	No⁶	Yes	Yes	No	No	Tags	No/Prt	Yes	Web
Digital library
Greenstone	Yes	Yes	No	Yes⁸	Yes⁸	Yes	No	Yes	Yes/Yes	Yes	Perl, Apache

Feature comparison between BibGlimpse and other bibliographic software tools. 'Prt' indicates that a feature is partly supported. ¹ Searches and selected references can be stored in collections. ² Covers the first 120 kB of open access papers and a non-disclosed list of publishers; all recent articles by Elsevier publications are, e.g., excluded. PubMed is indexed with a lagtime of up to a year. ³ Linking bibliography to full text; not the other way around. ⁴ For a given reference an automated online search for the corresponding full-text can be performed. ⁵ Requires file named PMID.pdf, where PMID is the PubMed ID, to download bibliography from PubMed. ⁶ Needs link to website, not link to PDF. Retrieval is not generic, but publisher site tailored. ⁷ Notes are not searchable. ⁸ Greenstone is a tool to build digital libraries, so library needs to be designed first. ⁹ MySQL database can be queried directly by passing MySQL search strings. ¹⁰ Input means that results of external tools can easily be input into the system for subsequent integrated analysis and searches. Output means that data in the system can be output to external tools. ¹¹ Code free for non-profit and academic use. ¹² Package providing PHP, MySQL and Apache for different platforms.

ISSN: 1471-2105