zbib.org: Parse formatted references?

I have some colleagues whom I cannot convince to use a reference manager, but who often need to reformat their references to another style or update them (e.g., to re-add the issue number to their APA references now that it’s always required in APA 7).

I suggested extracting the DOIs and pasting them into zbib.org to do that. I was wondering whether it might be possible to expand the zbib functionality so that a user could paste a whole reference, rather than just an identifier, URL, or title? Essentially, combining zbib and AnyStyle?

In terms of functionality, it could try to retrieve metadata using the identifier, URL, or parsed metadata or, failing that, return a formatted reference using just the parsed data.

  • Oh hey, it already seems to do that. Mind blown.
  • It's not really doing that. It will extract identifiers, but failing that it just falls back to text search, which can work, but it's very slow.

    Parsing structured metadata (like Import from Clipboard in Zotero) is doable — it will already take a URL to a RIS/BibTeX/etc. file and parse that, so doing the same with a direct paste should be pretty easy. Issue created.

    Actually parsing formatted references like AnyStyle would be a lot more complicated, and would probably mean running AnyStyle server-side. I haven't looked into how hard that is, but it's something we could consider.
Sign In or Register to comment.