Are there ways of importing the bibliographies of others' papers?

What are the ways of importing the bibliographies of others?

Zotero groups are one way, and they are +great+. But there is as yet not so much, for me at least, to import.

I guess that major researchers using Endnote etc have great, massive, bibliographies, but are they sharing them, and if so where?

I read here on the Zotero forums somewhere about parsing software that might (or rather does not quite) succeed in parsing human-readable bibliographies from journal articles. I had a go, but it did not work. I guess there are inherent difficulties in such attempts. Parsing human readable rtf, pdf or word files did not work for me. The parsers, such as I tried, did not quite work.

So what are the options?

Are there nice kind academics that share their endnote or bibtex bibliographic data?

Are there other Zotero-group-like sites where one can grab a big heap of references?

Or are there database type sites (JSOR etc) from which one can grab the bibliography of a famous paper?
E.g. the site
http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/182/6/525.full#ref-12
shows a bibliography but Zotero only allows me to grab the bibliographic reference to the paper itself not the bibliography of that paper, even though it is listed, alas in human readable form.

I don't have only limited access to academic databases. But all the same I have browsed sites (perhaps only from my workplace computer) which like the above site
http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/182/6/525.full#ref-12
(but not that site) showed me the bibliography of the paper that I, lacking access could not retrieve. What if any, JSTOR/PROQUEST/Firstsearch/MUSE site allows us to grab a whole bibliography in a database readable format?

My field is not so big. If I could get the bibliographic data from a few of the major papers then I would be very happy. I'd get 500 or so bibliographic entries. I could do the same by searching for each reference in Google scholar but....

Is there anyway of importing the bibliographies of other papers, other than attempts to parse human readable (pdf, rtf, doc, docx) into database (bibtex etc) readable?

Tim
  • Public Zotero groups allow that - obviously you'd need to find them yourself.
    You may also see if people have their Zotero libraries public - there is a new translator for Zotero.org - you may have to wait until the 3.0.4 release until it works, though.
    Other sites like CiteUlike and Mendeley also have social features for sharing libraries.

    I'm not aware of any databases that allow you to import whole bibliographies. If you look e.g. at the bjp site, there is no metadata associated with the bibliography. As for importing references from paper - it sounds like you've seen this: http://www.zotero.org/support/kb/importing_formatted_bibliographies that's really all we know about that.
  • Thank you Adam Smith, I will try CiteUlike and Mendeley.

    I have already had a look through Zotero and I can drag from the group libraries I have joined. There is surprisingly little there.

    Metadata....Thank you. I suppose that there is a good chances that, as with the bjp site, even if a provider (e.g. Jstor) shows the bibliography, they will not provide metadata for export. Since the elements are probably particularly standard (even more so than a pdf or word file), so that maybe a translator might be available, perhaps.

    Yes this
    http://www.zotero.org/support/kb/importing_formatted_bibliographies
    is the page I saw, but I did not get much joy from it. But thanks to however it was that put that together.

    Tim
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