Perfect Dual For Serious Writing Tools: LyX and Mendeley

If you are a LaTeX user. Then you can skip the rest of this section to the use, otherwise, let me try to convince you.

You see, if you are writing academic papers, report, research publications, any strict-format documents, LaTeX is the best tool to give you the right documents. All other word processors focus on both contents and format, while LaTeX only asks you to focus on the content, the format can be done later and precisely. But a downside of LaTeX is the syntax and the structure. It is pure text file with weird commands and directives. The learning curve is rather high for traditional word processor users.

I found this LyX very useful. It is pretty much like a word processor and LyX can incorporate with LaTeX code., although LyX does not claim to be a WYSIWYG tool for LaTeX. LyX uses LaTeX class, style, bibliography-style files which can be added later.

For Bibliography management, LyX uses BibTeX. BibTeX can be generated from any tool. For this particular use, I found Mendeley the best among tools I have tried. Mendeley synced your bibliography with the cloud. Every workstation that you work on with the same user, you will always the identical copy of papers. Although Mendeley limits your storage to 500 MB, but that is plenty and you have an option to upgrade the storage. Mendeley is also a community where you can share your library with your colleagues. Sorry, I gave up EndNote long time ago, it may have improved but I do not bother to check. The pain was too great.

Now you can generate BibTeX library for your paper organized in folders and let LyX uses it to manage citation and reference sections. Whether author or information prominent citations, LyX citation management is very efficient. What more is LyX has tracking feature, which allows co-author editing. What else do you want more?

Email tag?

Just organising my mailboxes with filters and rules, now what if emails have tags? Just like some people try to do that in the subject line of the email, such as [PROJECT-A] call for meeting. That actually helps me think of what to deal with the email quickly. Of course, there can't only be pros about one thing. I am so certain that spammer will abuse the tag.

More research on this topic, and I'll come back to discuss later.

Automatic Conference Rank Look Up

I subscribed email alert for conferences, because I so needed to publish my work in time. But it isn't that I can publish to any conference, it has to be at least in certain rank. These conference alert services won't report a proper ranking, or some conferences just refer to weird/funny/hoax ranking systems. I have some reliable sources of ranking in a Google Doc spreadsheet, now I want to look up the name of conferences from emails I received with the spreadsheet. Once again, this is a note for something I wanted to do, but yet no time.

Mendeley - my best reference management system

Regarding to my previous blog post, CiteULike API, it seems I have not surfed the web enough to learn that there is so good reference management system (RMS) called Mendeley. Now I am kinda give up CiteULike for good.

Mendeley provides both online and desktop version. The desktop synchronises with the online references. Here you need to have a user account. The service is free under 500MB storage. The storage is for PDFs if you would like to attach it in your library. You can import most famous RMSs into Mendeley. Your PDFs are synced to every computer you install the desktop software with your account. It downloads your entire library to the local machine. Another great feature is it can scan PDFs on your machine and search fora suitable reference in its online database. Local search is fast, way faster than online RMSs for certain.
Thus far, Mendeley is my personal best RMS choice.

[Idea] Hot reference to online reference site

I always love the way LaTeX neatly compiles my references in BibTeX with \ref directive. And I use CiteULike to manage my reference online. I export my CiteULike library to a .bib file for LaTeX to compile locally. But whenever I update a reference's citation abbreviation, it's just broken. I wish there is a more systematic way to incorporate the reference source and the authoring tool. If I can browse the online library from the LaTeX authoring tool, and the tool also keeps track of the update citation. This would just be extraordinary great.

Somehow, if I've missed the existing tools that can do this, please let me know.

CiteULike API

CiteULike is a fantastic tool for reference and citation collected from the Internet. However, I am never satisfied with its website. CiteULike search is just too funny; given a complete paper title, it shows me ZERO result, but Google simply just searches through and gives me the right page in CiteULike.

But the good thing is, it provides API. A nice Chrome extension, CiteULike Web Importer, utilised that so well. It replaces CiteULike bookmark tool and seamlessly integrates with the browser's extension button. There are more to be done; I always want to do but yet no time.

1. Better search: search that works better than the one CiteULike provides in terms of accuracy and functionality. Google scholar can do way better.
2. Cite abbreviation manipulation: some abbreviations of papers are assigned automatically and it's ridiculously long. I want to see them listed with the paper title and authors.
3. Hierarchical tag: plain tagging is an old school of tagging and it is just not working. YAGBE, a Chrome extension for Google Bookmark that looks at a particular delimiter as a path separator, the idea is cool and simple.

That's about it.

PS: As I was writing this blog, Chrome spell checker does not recognise the word Google! Day made!