
BibItNow! by Langenscheiss
Instantly creates a Bibtex, RIS, Endnote, APA, MLA or (B)Arnold S. or any user-defined bibliography item, or a user-defined link from abstract pages of scientific journal articles, books and theses, or from news pages and generic websites!
Extension Metadata

NEW FEATURE 0.898: Publisher address BETA. Based on a combination of a fixed address list, ISBN and website meta data, BibItNow! attempts to obtain the likely address of the publisher if the citation is a book/chapter. However, due to the sheer amount of publishers and imprints, this is currently limited to mostly English and German publishers, with French/Spanish following later. Also, since many publishers have headquarters in several countries, the stated address might not always be the right one for the specific copy cited. This is complicated by the fact that the ISBN does not indicate the precise country in case of English speaking territory. And unfortunately, the ISBN agency does not allow tools to systematically access their database, so BibItNow! cannot make use of it.
NOTE: The "autofocus" option does not work all the time due to a bug in Firefox. If the citation text is not highlighted upon opening the extension popup, click on the popup once and the text will be highlighted automatically. This auto highlight is only performed if the first attempt to highlight the text fails. Further clicks on the popup will not result in the citation text being highlighted.
DESCRIPTION
So what!? Why should I care about "BibItNow!" ?
Well, probably most scientists know the following situation: you are looking up a nice article that you want to cite, but you somehow run into troubles getting the bibliographic data from your browser into your citation library. It is often already hard to find the "export" button, but even if you have found it, chances are that it does not work if you use a script blocker to avoid the bazillions of unnecessary scripts that are let loose at you nowadays. And even if the export button works, the result is often useless, as it comes in an inconvenient format or contains special characters that are not compatible with your particular bibliography system of choice.
Bibliographic tools which are directly coupled to the browser, such as the popular tool Zotero, have already simplified this task a lot. However, the workflow of these tools is mostly optimized towards their own integrated library system, whereas many users might prefer different library tools while only caring about the citation data extraction capabilities. This plugin offers exactly that, a lightweight tool that focuses solely on extracting citation data as quickly and as correctly as possible. Click the extension's tool bar icon or press the browser action shortcut keys when surfing on the abstract page of a journal article, a book, a thesis, or on any other web page, and the extension will try everything to extract all the data you want. In the format you like, with the encoding it needs! Decide whether you want to simply copy to clipboard, download a file or open it with the program of YOUR CHOICE!
Not happy? You can also contribute by visiting my github:
https://github.com/Langenscheiss/bibitnow
Main Features
- Versatility: Generates bibliography items of journal articles, books, theses and generic web pages in the Bibtex, RIS, Endnote, APA, MLA, (B)Arnold S. or any user-defined format.
- Quick workflow: No more need to mess with the publisher's export button! One click or key stroke to extract the data and either show it in the popup (DEFAULT: ALT+C) , automatically copy it to clipboard (DEFAULT: Alt+W), or to download it as file (DEFAULT: ALT+Q). In the popup, a second click or key stroke lets you copy the data, open a redirection link or download/open the citation with your favorite library software. The extension furthermore comes with a set of options purely aimed at improving your workflow. For example, the plugin automatically generates a clickable and easily copyable DOI link if a DOI is found, or any other used defined link based on the available citation data (e.g., search author on google). The plugin can also be configured to automatically highlight the citation text, enabling completely mouseless operation.
- Simplicity: The plugin only extracts, formats and exports bibliographic data, and its functions are only aimed at avoiding the most common nuisances in these three steps. No fancy library system included!
- Compatibility: An extensively tested set of fixed extraction and parsing rules combined with URL specific adjustments allows the plugin to work on abstract pages of many publishers, including Nature, Science, Elsevier, Springer and any publisher that cares to provide commonly formatted meta data. The extension furthermore works on journal article pages of the scientific databases PubMed and Scopus, and of the open access library arXiv. You can also cite books from various sources, such as Google books or the book section of Amazon, and news articles from any news website providing json linked data in the schema.org format.
- Modifiability: Each citation format comes with a number of easily reachable and adjustable settings. Moreover, for the advanced user/contributor, the flexible data extraction and parsing system allows to easily add or improve the support for specific web pages. Add custom search queries via CSS selectors, and preprocess the extracted data. All in simple, URL-specific Javascript code.
- Optimized for Bibtex: Decide which bibliography field and how many authors to include, customize the bibkey, set whether to abbreviate the journal title and how to include URLs,. Special characters are automatically replaced by the corresponding Latex command, the format of names and initials is standardized, and math mode commands/formulas are preserved!
Credits/References
- XML formatted journal abbreviations are originally cited from the archive of the Woodward Library at the University Of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada,
http://woodward.library.ubc.ca/research-help/journal-abbreviations/
from the JabRef list available here,
https://github.com/JabRef/abbrv.jabref.org/tree/master/journals
and from the list provided by "The Theta Foundation",
https://www.theta.ro/jot/res/serials_list/annser_A.html
- Publisher address information has been obtained and adapted from several sources.
1.) University of Leicester Publisher List:
https://www2.le.ac.uk/offices/english-association/yw/publishers
2.) Deutscher Bildungsserver:
https://www.bildungsserver.de/institutionen_de.html?Katego=11&Name=&Ort=&Land=0&Staat=0&Schlagwort=&suchen=finden
3.) Wiki publisher lists:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English-language_book_publishing_companies
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_deutschsprachiger_Verlage
- All latex commands for character replacements are cited from the XML Entity Definitions for Characters (3rd Edition) published by the W3C Math Working Group.
https://www.w3.org/2003/entities/2007doc/
- All non-numerical HTML entities are replaced using a lookup tabled cited from the Character Entity Reference Chart published by the W3C HTML Working Group.
https://dev.w3.org/html5/html-author/charref
- A list of unicode identities of all letter characters in all languages
is cited from the XRegExp library source:
http://xregexp.com/
- The extension popup uses the CSS style reset kindly provided by Meyerweb.
http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/css/reset/
- UTF16 (non-BMP) characters are read using a function kindly provided by the Mozilla Developer Network.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/String/charCodeAt
NOTE: The "autofocus" option does not work all the time due to a bug in Firefox. If the citation text is not highlighted upon opening the extension popup, click on the popup once and the text will be highlighted automatically. This auto highlight is only performed if the first attempt to highlight the text fails. Further clicks on the popup will not result in the citation text being highlighted.
DESCRIPTION
So what!? Why should I care about "BibItNow!" ?
Well, probably most scientists know the following situation: you are looking up a nice article that you want to cite, but you somehow run into troubles getting the bibliographic data from your browser into your citation library. It is often already hard to find the "export" button, but even if you have found it, chances are that it does not work if you use a script blocker to avoid the bazillions of unnecessary scripts that are let loose at you nowadays. And even if the export button works, the result is often useless, as it comes in an inconvenient format or contains special characters that are not compatible with your particular bibliography system of choice.
Bibliographic tools which are directly coupled to the browser, such as the popular tool Zotero, have already simplified this task a lot. However, the workflow of these tools is mostly optimized towards their own integrated library system, whereas many users might prefer different library tools while only caring about the citation data extraction capabilities. This plugin offers exactly that, a lightweight tool that focuses solely on extracting citation data as quickly and as correctly as possible. Click the extension's tool bar icon or press the browser action shortcut keys when surfing on the abstract page of a journal article, a book, a thesis, or on any other web page, and the extension will try everything to extract all the data you want. In the format you like, with the encoding it needs! Decide whether you want to simply copy to clipboard, download a file or open it with the program of YOUR CHOICE!
Not happy? You can also contribute by visiting my github:
https://github.com/Langenscheiss/bibitnow
Main Features
- Versatility: Generates bibliography items of journal articles, books, theses and generic web pages in the Bibtex, RIS, Endnote, APA, MLA, (B)Arnold S. or any user-defined format.
- Quick workflow: No more need to mess with the publisher's export button! One click or key stroke to extract the data and either show it in the popup (DEFAULT: ALT+C) , automatically copy it to clipboard (DEFAULT: Alt+W), or to download it as file (DEFAULT: ALT+Q). In the popup, a second click or key stroke lets you copy the data, open a redirection link or download/open the citation with your favorite library software. The extension furthermore comes with a set of options purely aimed at improving your workflow. For example, the plugin automatically generates a clickable and easily copyable DOI link if a DOI is found, or any other used defined link based on the available citation data (e.g., search author on google). The plugin can also be configured to automatically highlight the citation text, enabling completely mouseless operation.
- Simplicity: The plugin only extracts, formats and exports bibliographic data, and its functions are only aimed at avoiding the most common nuisances in these three steps. No fancy library system included!
- Compatibility: An extensively tested set of fixed extraction and parsing rules combined with URL specific adjustments allows the plugin to work on abstract pages of many publishers, including Nature, Science, Elsevier, Springer and any publisher that cares to provide commonly formatted meta data. The extension furthermore works on journal article pages of the scientific databases PubMed and Scopus, and of the open access library arXiv. You can also cite books from various sources, such as Google books or the book section of Amazon, and news articles from any news website providing json linked data in the schema.org format.
- Modifiability: Each citation format comes with a number of easily reachable and adjustable settings. Moreover, for the advanced user/contributor, the flexible data extraction and parsing system allows to easily add or improve the support for specific web pages. Add custom search queries via CSS selectors, and preprocess the extracted data. All in simple, URL-specific Javascript code.
- Optimized for Bibtex: Decide which bibliography field and how many authors to include, customize the bibkey, set whether to abbreviate the journal title and how to include URLs,. Special characters are automatically replaced by the corresponding Latex command, the format of names and initials is standardized, and math mode commands/formulas are preserved!
Credits/References
- XML formatted journal abbreviations are originally cited from the archive of the Woodward Library at the University Of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada,
http://woodward.library.ubc.ca/research-help/journal-abbreviations/
from the JabRef list available here,
https://github.com/JabRef/abbrv.jabref.org/tree/master/journals
and from the list provided by "The Theta Foundation",
https://www.theta.ro/jot/res/serials_list/annser_A.html
- Publisher address information has been obtained and adapted from several sources.
1.) University of Leicester Publisher List:
https://www2.le.ac.uk/offices/english-association/yw/publishers
2.) Deutscher Bildungsserver:
https://www.bildungsserver.de/institutionen_de.html?Katego=11&Name=&Ort=&Land=0&Staat=0&Schlagwort=&suchen=finden
3.) Wiki publisher lists:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English-language_book_publishing_companies
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_deutschsprachiger_Verlage
- All latex commands for character replacements are cited from the XML Entity Definitions for Characters (3rd Edition) published by the W3C Math Working Group.
https://www.w3.org/2003/entities/2007doc/
- All non-numerical HTML entities are replaced using a lookup tabled cited from the Character Entity Reference Chart published by the W3C HTML Working Group.
https://dev.w3.org/html5/html-author/charref
- A list of unicode identities of all letter characters in all languages
is cited from the XRegExp library source:
http://xregexp.com/
- The extension popup uses the CSS style reset kindly provided by Meyerweb.
http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/css/reset/
- UTF16 (non-BMP) characters are read using a function kindly provided by the Mozilla Developer Network.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/String/charCodeAt
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This add-on needs to:
- Access your data for citation-needed.springer.com
This add-on may also ask to:
- Input data to the clipboard
- Add-on Links
- Version
- 0.899
- Size
- 922.47 KB
- Last updated
- 4 months ago (Nov 8, 2020)
- License
- Mozilla Public License, version 2.0
- Version History
version 0.899
--Parser--
* added most Penguin Random House imprints to list of book publisher addresses
* improved publisher address detection by taking into account the top level domain in order to prioritize publisher address matches
--Site specific adjusters--
* added Canadian amazon
--Custom citation formats/bibkey customizer
* added instructions \L{} and \U{} in replacement string to convert groups defined in regular expression to lower case (\L)/upper case (\U). See example on option page!
* fixed bug preventing arrays addressed with bibfield and options (e.g., via "authors, 0") to be stringified
* added field domain_country containing the English country name corresponding to the top level domain
--Format strings/bibkey customizer
* added support for curly-bracket quantifiers in regular expressions
--Site-specific adjusters--
* improved author name extraction on royal society publishing
--Parser--
* added most Penguin Random House imprints to list of book publisher addresses
* improved publisher address detection by taking into account the top level domain in order to prioritize publisher address matches
--Site specific adjusters--
* added Canadian amazon
--Custom citation formats/bibkey customizer
* added instructions \L{} and \U{} in replacement string to convert groups defined in regular expression to lower case (\L)/upper case (\U). See example on option page!
* fixed bug preventing arrays addressed with bibfield and options (e.g., via "authors, 0") to be stringified
* added field domain_country containing the English country name corresponding to the top level domain
--Format strings/bibkey customizer
* added support for curly-bracket quantifiers in regular expressions
--Site-specific adjusters--
* improved author name extraction on royal society publishing
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The function to automatically highlight the citation text is unfortunately affected by a long-standing bug in Firefox causing the extension popup to lose focus, in particular when opened with the keyboard short-cut. I have filed a bug here
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1647512
The bug has since been confirmed and I hope that Mozilla will fix it soon. For version 0.894, there will be "band-aid" work around for this: if the popup loses focus upon opening, it will rehighlight the citation text once it regains focus, which is when you click on the popup. It requires an extra click, but you don't need to manually highlight the citation text.