InterBib: Help for Converting Bibliographies


NOTE: This document is somewhat dated. For an update, see the Release Notes for the 2007 InterBib overhaul.

General Description

This form allows you to convert one or more bibliographies from BibTeX/Refer/InterBib format to nicely formatted HTML or MIF, or to bibliographies in BibTeX or Refer formats.

This help page describes the full-functionality form. The simple form is a subset.

Specifying the Bibliographies

You fill in any mixture of BibTex, Refer or InterBib bibliography file names (on your machine), or URLs to bibliography files elsewhere. Then you click either the HTML or the MIF button. After some waiting time during which your files are transferred to the server and processed, a file with the new format is returned. For HTML, this is displayed in the browser. For MIF files, you will be prompted for a destination on your system.

Declaring the Bibliography Formats

With each file/URL input box you will find a choice for declaring whether the respective file is of type Refer, BibTeX, etc. By default, the system will deduce the type from the file extension: '.ref' for Refer, '.bib' for BibTeX and no extension for InterBib databases.

Adding a Title

If the optional title input box is filled in, the resulting Web page will be given a header and title accordingly. This is true for both HTML and MIF conversions.

Errors and Warnings

Any errors that occur during the translation are displayed a separate window pane. An error is a problem severe enough that a bibliography entry could not be translated. Such an entry is dropped. Translation continues. Warnings will not cause an entry to be dropped. They usually complain about fields that are missing in bibliography records.

Links in Bibliographies

You can add links in your bibliographies. For BibTeX, these are placed in a field that must be called 'links'. In Refer, they must be placed in the field tagged '%1'. The format is as follows:

field:targetEnv:linkInfo

Where 'targetEnv' is either 'www' or 'frame'.

The following example, if inserted as a BibTeX field in one of your bibliography entries, will cause my home page to be linked to the author name in your bibliography entry:

links = "author:www:http://www-db.stanford.edu/~paepcke"

The following will do the same, but with Framemaker links:

links = "title:frame:/u/paepcke/foo.frm mammals"

Multiple link specs can be combined as in this example in the Refer system:

%1 (title:www:http://moo.com/theScoop.html), (title:frame:/u/paepcke/foo.frm mammals)

or

%1 (title:www:http://moo.com/theScoop.html), (author:www:http://www-db.stanford.edu/~paepcke)

Annotated Bibliographies

If you include fields 'annote' or 'comments' in your BiBTeX bibliography, or '%X' in your Refer bibliography, you have a choice of producing an annotated bibliography or one without annotations. There's a button which lets you choose.

Permission to retain bibliography

We are trying to automatically accumulate bibliographies for you and others to use. Unless you disallow it in the form, InterBib will retain any error-free bibliographies your send and make them available to you and others as InterBib databases. They are available through the search interface. Depending on their length, it may take a few minutes for yours to come up in the form after your document processing is done. Note that your bibliography material will only be added to the collection if it parses correctly all the way through.

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Comments/bugs to Andreas Paepcke: