ADS to Bibdesk.

ADS To BibDesk

ADS to BibDesk is an Automator action that allows an astronomy article being viewing in Safari to have its LaTeX bibliography information added to your BibDesk database. Download ADS to BibDesk.

Usage

1. You should have the ADS or arxiv.org abstract page of whatever paper you're interested in opened as the top window in Safari. [Note, if you're at a paper's abstract page on arxiv.org, my code will automagically find the corresponding paper in ADS, and proceed to harvest information from that. The arxiv.org support is given for convienience.]
2. If you decide that you want the paper in your BibDesk database, simply launch the "ADS to BibDesk" application, and it will do the rest for you. For convenience, I find its best to put the "ADS to BibDesk" application in the Dock so that its easy to get at. "ADS to BibDesk" will quit itself when complete, and you can see its progress in the form of a little stop light and message in your menu bar.
3. To store the PDF article itself, you can download the PDF and drag it onto the bib item's entry. This way your articles are their LaTeX references are readily accessible from BibDesk, and spotlight search-able.

Setting up BibDesk for Best Effect

1. This app works best if you have one main bibliography that you put all papers into. This one bibliography document should always be the top-most document in BibDesk (this doesn't include Publication windows). Otherwise "ADS to BibDesk" will put the bib entry into whatever BibDesk document is active.
2. "ADS to BibDesk" will launch BibDesk for you if its closed. To have your main bibliography always open on BibDesk launch, set this behaviour in BibDesk's Preferences > General.
3. A great feature of BibDesk is cite-key generation so that the long ADS cite keys become something nicer like Sick:2008. You can have this set up in BibDesk's Preferences > Cite Key.
4. Also set the auto-renamning of the files so that the PDFs you attach to the bib items are systematically named. Under BibDesks's Preferences > Auto-File, I use a custom naming scheme: %a1%Y%u0%e so that the articles are named like Sick:2008, or Sick:2008b as necessary.

Installing

1. Download the app from http://homepage.mac.com/jonathansick/notes/ads_bibdesk/ADS_BibDesk.tar
2. Un-zip and put the application in your Applications folder (or wherever)
3. For convenience, drag the app into your dock.

History

1.1 Dec 2007 Changed webpage parsing logic (RdJ).
1.0 Aug 2007 First release.

Known Short-comings

• This version does not yet download the pdf for you. I need to think about how the journals redirect ADS links to their PDFs. Pre-print downloading from arxiv might be easier. But since it will auto-generate the cite key (unlike the Services menu implementation), if you download the paper manually and then drag it onto the Local File field of the publication in BibDesk (and BibDesk is set to auto file) the paper will be renamed to your cite key and auto filed into your papers folder.
• It will only work if the abstract page is open in Safari; other browsers like Firefox aren't supported.
• Mac OS X 10.4+ is needed due to the use of Automator.
• If ADS or arxiv.org change the template of their HTML or URLs, my parsing code might break.
• It does not write your paper for you.