5 ms·
Show HN: One-click citations for your essays
- slg 12y agoVery cool. This would have saved me tons of time in college. One minor usability issue, clicking the different style after generating the citation doesn't have any result until you generate a new citation. That is a little unintuitive. I would either switch to the different style immediately or put some separation in the UI between the returned citation and the components that are used to generate a new citation.
- michaelq 12y agoThanks for the feedback. Originally, clicking the style pill button refreshed the citation (in the selected style), which I think is the behavior you're describing. It sounds like I should go back to that behavior.
- agildehaus 12y agoHave the server respond with the necessary info but generate the style client side instead of server side. There doesn't appear to be any need to make trips back to the server to change styles. Also, "http://google.com" http://google.com" complains about robots.txt, but "http://google.com/" http://google.com/" (trailing slash) does not.
- michaelq 12y agoYou're right - I could just pass the variables as JS to the client, then assemble the final citation there. Great idea! Regarding the trailing slash, that's a regex problem, and I will solve it! Nice catch.
- michaelq 12y agoI've updated the app to go ahead and generate a new citation when you change styles. This happens pretty quickly, and this saves the user a click. Thanks for the feedback!
- Gam3rholic 12y agogood looking site, cool service
- sperling75 12y agoCool, can I see an example ?
- michaelq 12y agoSure. Any DOI you pull off of Google scholar should work. Same with ISBNs off the back of any book you have lying around. And it works with most news sites. http://www.speedcite.com/?q=http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/usanow/2014/04/29/oklahoma-executions-drugs-lethal-injection/8476389/&f=mla http://www.speedcite.com/?q=http://www.usatoday.com/story/ne...
- richardjordan 12y agoThis is great. Nice work.
- yongparkk 12y agoThis is really neat. Wish I had this during my high school/college years.
- rubious_dan 12y agoI used KnightCite in college, this would have been great.
- ofirnachum 12y agoIs there a reason it doesn't show author names when I submit a URL like http://www.sciencemag.org/content/210/4472/903.short http://www.sciencemag.org/content/210/4472/903.short ?
- michaelq 12y agoSciencemag.org uses a special metatag for authors (citation_author). I'm not sure how common this is, but I will add logic to check these. Then SpeedCite would properly cite the author.
- aerialfish 12y agoYeah I see the same happening with bbc. Example: http://www.bbc.com/news/health-27204988 http://www.bbc.com/news/health-27204988
- michaelq 12y agoThe BBC doesn't have an author metatag for some reason. I can search for a 'byline' span as a fallback. Thanks for noticing this.
- acbart 12y agoWhat does this offer over using Google Scholar's citations?
- michaelq 12y agoIf you already have a DOI on your clipboard or are copying it from your text editor, it would save you a few clicks and page loads.
- sperling75 12y agoVery cool. Would have saved me a ton of time.
- jonlucc 12y agoAn ISBN for a book shows up as a web resource in Google Books. Is there a way to get it to just be the book?
- michaelq 12y agoFrom the ISBN alone, it's difficult to differentiate between an electronic book (such as one retrieved by Google Books) and a physical one. Would it be helpful to add a switch allowing you to specify whether you want electronic book citations or print book citations?
- jonlucc 12y agoYes, but personally, I think the ISBN identifies the physical book. We have other ways to identify web resources, like by URL. Thanks!
- jjyoung135 12y agoSuper fast! Thanks for this great tool!
- aaren 12y agoFor interest, you can do something like this on the command line using curl. Try these: curl -LH "Accept: text/bibliography" "http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0022112061000019" curl -LH "Accept: text/bibliography; style=bibtex" "http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0022112061000019" curl -LH "Accept: text/bibliography; style=apa" "http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0022112061000019" My academic life became a lot simpler when I learnt this - now I only need to maintain a database of {cite key: DOI} pairs, rather than a bibtex monster. Yes, I have tried Mendeley et al. and yes, I do prefer scripts that do what I tell them to.
- aroch 12y agoOk, that's pretty awesome. Time to shove this into a Word macro (because, I have to use word :( )
- michaelq 12y agoThis works great! I looked into doi.org before but I wasn't sure what their ratelimit is. I'm currently using phantomJS and google scholar for DOIs, and I think I might have hit their rate limit already, so I will take a second look at this!
- aaren 12y agop.s. I found I had to use 'data.crossref.org' instead of 'dx.doi.org' when I scripted it (python + requests). Not sure why exactly (doi was redirecting to crossref anyway).
- aaren 12y agoHow to do it in python in case anyone is wondering: import requests import json url = 'http://data.crossref.org/10.1017/S0022112061000019' headers = {'Accept': 'application/citeproc+json'} r = requests.get(url, headers=headers) meta = json.loads(r.content) # meta is a dictionary of metadata, e.g. meta['DOI']
- mmcnickle 12y ago
- tlb 12y agoIt didn't work with the ISBN I tried: 978-0-06-121495-0. For the paperback of this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_Your_Dangerous_Idea%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_Your_Dangerous_Idea%3F. A google search on the ISBN finds it. EDIT: aha, you have to remove dashes for it to work. It should probably do this automatically.
- cabbeer 12y agoI used easybib.com for my school work.
- anmilo 12y agovery cool, just forwarded this to some of my editor/writer friends
- jwb119 12y agoAwesome job. Would be really cool to see something like this for legal citations as well.
- michaelq 12y agoIf you could link me to an example of a typical legal citation you would use, I can look into it.
- denzil_correa 12y agoYou should introduce a Bibtex format too if you have to rope in the academia crowd.
- RankingMember 12y agoDamn, this is awesome. I would've loved something like this back in school. I did them manually.
- tommorris 12y agoCan you add Wikipedia citation formats? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_templates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_templates
- michaelq 12y agoI'm amazed Wikipedia doesn't have a first-party tool for this. I can look into it. I'm trying to keep SpeedCite as simple as possible. If there is demand, I could maybe build a stand-alone app for this?
- tommorris 12y agoThere's a few tools. There's some built-in JavaScript on Wikipedia, plus I use https://reftag.appspot.com/ https://reftag.appspot.com/ a lot and a few Vim snipMate snippets.
- rkuykendall-com 12y agoI clicked a book on the Amazon Books homepage and couldn't get it to work with the URL, ISBN, or ISBN-14. The Fault in Our Stars Paperback by John Green: http://www.amazon.com/The-Fault-Stars-John-Green/dp/014242417X/ref=acs_ux_rw_ts_b_books_2_i/181-1226938-4232212?_encoding=UTF8&s=books&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=merchandised-search-5&pf_rd_r=1KBZV025GCFHMJHM3TAC&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=1615333102&pf_rd_i=283155 http://www.amazon.com/The-Fault-Stars-John-Green/dp/01424241...
- michaelq 12y agohttp://www.speedcite.com/?q=9780142424179&f=chi http://www.speedcite.com/?q=9780142424179&f=chi works. I had to remove the dash from the ISBN-14. This is a known issue (as of an hour ago). For the ISBN-10, there's a check digit X (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Check_digit#Design http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Check_digit#Design) that I haven't encountered before. Thank you for pointing out these issues!
- michaelq 12y agoOK, I've fixed both of these ISBN issues and pushed them to production. So both 014242417X and 978-0142424179, and similar ISBNs, should be no problem.
- bradknowles 12y agoDoesn't work on the web page at http://gigaom.com/2014/04/29/supreme-court-reverses-patent-judges-again-in-9-0-decision-on-lawyer-fees/ http://gigaom.com/2014/04/29/supreme-court-reverses-patent-j... The subject line gets cut much too short, and the URL gets trimmed to the root level of the domain.
- michaelq 12y agoMLA, APA and Chicago style guides don't recommend including the full domain unless it would be too difficult to otherwise find. Hence the truncation.
- bradknowles 12y agoOkay, fair enough. But what about the full subject?
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- michaelq 12y agoYou're right - sometimes it will truncate the full subject. I'm looking into fixing this.
- zmguy 12y agoI think it's interesting the URL citation does not actually include the URL. It seems like the title of the article and the domain. Why is the exact URL of the resource is not important?
- michaelq 12y agoI could certainly include it, but doing so is not usually required for MLA, APA or Chicago citations, and it would in many cases, make the citation really long.
- thecosas 12y agoI think that the reference makes sense as far as longevity. How often do links to a specific page change? Very often. How often do domains change? Not as often. MLA and other style guides are generally written with print in mind, not links directly to content being cited.
- zmguy 12y agoSites that want their content linked, reused and cited should use some sort of permalinking strategy. I don't think we should have a unverifiable citation because a publication does not follow sound link generation strategies. Provenance of the information is what we seek, citing a journal who doesn't provide a time proof way to access the resource should not be cited.
- bradknowles 12y agoGoing to the URL for this page (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7674449 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7674449) and plugging that into speedcite, I get back truncated information on the subject line: The MLA format cite comes out as: "Show HN: One." Ycombinator.com. N.p. Web. 30 Apr. 2014. <https://news.ycombinator.com/> https://news.ycombinator.com/> The APA format cite comes out as: Show HN: One. Ycombinator.com. Retrieved Apr 30, 2014, from https://news.ycombinator.com https://news.ycombinator.com. The Chicago formate cite comes out as: "Show HN: One." Ycombinator.com. https://news.ycombinator.com/ https://news.ycombinator.com/.
- bradknowles 12y agoNone of them get the subject correct, which is: Show HN: One-click citations for your essays (speedcite.com)
- michaelq 12y agoI see what you mean. Thanks for catching this! I agree, this needs to be fixed ASAP.
- quasque 12y agoLooks nice, but it doesn't retrieve results for many of the DOIs I tried, e.g. 10.1155/2014/863625 and 10.4103/0970-2113.129901, and gave an incorrect result for this one: 10.1073/pnas.1324197111 Feature suggestions: would be nice if it accepted PubMed ids, and supported other popular citation styles like Hardvard and Vancouver (or alternatively, permitted some customisation of the citation format).
- michaelq 12y agoThanks for your feedback! Posting on HN seems to have caused speedcite to exceed Google Scholar's rate limit, so I'll be switching to crossref.org for DOIs. Using the new logic (which I'm about to push), I was able to get the first two DOIs you mentioned, but I couldn't get 10.1073/pnas.1324197111 working on crossref.org or on Google Scholar. Where did you find this DOI? I'd like to figure out a way to support it and its kind.
- quasque 12y agoIt's from http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/04/24/1324197111 http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/04/24/1324197111, which I found via PubMed (search for "immunology", page 2). The only two services I've found that accept it are http://hdl.handle.net/ http://hdl.handle.net/ and http://dx.doi.org/ http://dx.doi.org/, and I think they're querying the same database.
- afandian 12y agoYes. More info here: http://www.doi.org/factsheets/DOIHandle.html http://www.doi.org/factsheets/DOIHandle.html That DOI is newly deposited, as I said in other comments, it may take a while to propagate.
- afandian 12y agoDo you know about the new CrossRef API? It might be of use. e.g. http://api.crossref.org/works/10.5555/12345678 http://api.crossref.org/works/10.5555/12345678 You can check the Registration Agency with CrossRef to see who's responsible for it: http://doi.crossref.org/ra/10.1073/pnas.1324197111 http://doi.crossref.org/ra/10.1073/pnas.1324197111 In this case, it is CrossRef. So this should work: http://api.crossref.org/works/10.1073/pnas.1324197111 http://api.crossref.org/works/10.1073/pnas.1324197111 It doesn't. I'll see if I can find out what's wrong. If you have any questions you can email labs@crossref.org EDIT: Looking at the Guest Query, http://www.crossref.org/guestquery/ http://www.crossref.org/guestquery/ it looks like this was deposited recently. There may be a delay in propagation through our systems.
- amadeusw 12y agoIEEE references would be fantastic! I don't think the ISBN lookup works correctly. Typing in 9781405347587 or 978-1405347587 returns a book with ISBN 0-9690745-2-2 I'd be looking forward to upgraded version with IEEE but I just graduated, ha!
- michaelq 12y agoWow, I didn't realize IEEE had their own citation format. Amazon has the ISBN 9781405347587. The only other google result for this is your comment, which Google seems to have already indexed :) Since Google Books doesn't have that ISBN, I would need 1) fail gracefully instead of giving a citation for the wrong book and 2) have a fallback API. I'm working on both of these. Thanks!