Bibliography & Citation

Six use cases that highlight the benefits of the Bibliography & Citation project

The Bibliography & Citation project (aka BibCite) is developed and maintained by ADCI Solutions and helps to organize and save bibliographic data about the content ranging from web pages to books and scientific research works. The project also helps to design citation of sources according to thousands of standards that have been accepted at different times in different organizations. 

As we can tell from the drupal.org statistics, at the time of the publication of this article BibCite is used on more than 281 websites. Its solutions are very specific, therefore each use case is highly likely to be a conscious one, and we as project`s creators appreciate it a lot. 

We tend to think that submitted issues and concerns about the module’s performance are legit indicators of BibCite`s success and demand. So, we have hundreds of issues to discuss. We decided to contact users to gather first-hand information about organizations they work in and the problems they solve using BibCite. 

We would like to thank our respondents and co-authors of this article.

Ricardo Marcelino, Omibee

Omibee is a Drupal agency that works with organizations such as research centers to help them promote and manage their activities.

Based on that experience, we developed Omibee Research, a prebuilt Drupal installation that enables research centers and institutes to have their own online platform with low entry effort.

Omibee Research can be fully customized according to specific needs; features and modules that are frequently used in this field are already included into its core: scientific activity management, research groups collaboration, grant, and annual reports management, etc. The core package includes Bibliography & Citation along with several other modules, preset entities, integrations, and a specifically designed theme.

The product is free to download and has the same license as Drupal (GPL v2), a theme and several ways to import information. The paid services we provide for this product focus on installation, customization and appearance.

There are currently around 10 centers in Portugal using Omibee Research. A few examples: 

Centro de Matemática - Universidade do Porto

Centro de Matemática - Universidade do Porto

Centro de Recursos Naturais e Ambiente (CERENA)

Centro de Recursos Naturais e Ambiente (CERENA)

An important part of the research activity is publications and therefore, it was essential to include Bibliography & Citation in this Drupal installation. We extended this Drupal project by creating modules that allow syncing publications from ORCID, DSpace, and other sources.

Previously, we used Biblio on Drupal 7, but it wasn’t available for Drupal 8. While looking for alternatives, we found Bibliography & Citation underactive development and ADCI supporting it. We chose to include it and contribute to its ecosystem and reached out to ADCI, offering collaboration on the project, instead of creating our custom solution with a set of custom entities for bibliographic information.

We believed that contributing and building on top of an existing project to be more beneficial to the Drupal community than reinventing a problem that was already being solved by somebody else.

João Rochate, Centro de Linguística da Universidade de Lisboa

We use the BibCite module in a research center Centro de Linguística da Universidade de Lisboa (CLUL) to display publications of researchers. CLUL is a Portuguese public R&D institution founded in 1932 as a center of philological studies. It developed into a research center in linguistics that expanded its activities and scientific intervention over time. The center is hosted by the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon (FLUL) and committed to research and development in the field of linguistics, with a particular emphasis on Portuguese — including dialectal, diachronic, social and national varieties — and on Portuguese-related Creoles.

The BibCite helps to organize and catalog CLUL scientific production by associating publications with each member. Some reports for research evaluation can also be produced from the publication database. From a set of submodules, we use Crossref and PubMed.

Centro de Linguística da Universidade de Lisboa

Centro de Linguística da Universidade de Lisboa

There are no alternatives when using Drupal 8 to build a site where the main subject is research and higher education. I think BibCite is a great module so I am grateful for ADCI`s job in Drupal.

Casper Voogt, Plethora Design

I run a web agency Plethora Design that maintains the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies. The Institute is dedicated to understanding how ecosystems work. Our scientists are global experts in the ecology of freshwater, forests, disease, and cities. Through collaborative efforts, we apply our science to policy and management that protects the environment and improves human well-being.

Cary Institute is one of the world’s leading independent environmental research organizations. Its staff has a deep understanding of the key drivers of ecological change, among them are climate change, invasive species, and human influence on land and water. 

Here's the page with publications, each provided with a Google Scholar and DOI links. The front-end just uses the search filter. Behind the scenes, we are using some of the submodules for importing bibliographic data. And on individual citation entities, there is a public export link as well.

Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies

Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies

Robert Casties, Max Planck Institute of the History of Science

We are currently using bibcite in two projects: Sound & Science: Digital Histories (SSDH) and Islamic Scientific Manuscripts Initiatives.
 
SSDH is an ongoing digitization project devoted to the history of acoustics, based on work by members of the research group Epistemes of Modern Acoustics at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. The database is a multimedia resource for historians of science, culture, and technology, along with students and other researchers. It aims to explore the relationship between historical innovations in the study of sound and the scientific, artistic, religious, and political practices that make up their context. 

Sound & Science: Digital Histories (SSDH)

Sound & Science: Digital Histories (SSDH)

The mission of the Islamic Scientific Manuscripts Initiative (ISMI) is to make accessible information on all Islamic manuscripts in the exact sciences (astronomy, mathematics, optics, mathematical geography, music, mechanics, and related disciplines), whether in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, or other languages.
 
In SSDH, we have content types for books, images, audio recordings, etc. Those are based on an early version of the BibCite module. The users entered all information into the database manually.
 
In the ISMI database, we use the BibCite module to manage the secondary literature bibliography (e.g. books, articles, etc.). The bibliography has been migrated from the Drupal 7 Biblio module and was originally imported from Endnote. New data is entered by users manually. We use both a fields view and the CSL output of entries. Users also clean up existing entries e.g. joining contributor entries.

Islamic Scientific Manuscripts Initiatives

Islamic Scientific Manuscripts Initiatives 

Islamic Scientific Manuscripts Initiatives

Islamic Scientific Manuscripts Initiatives 

For humanities scholars (but also in sciences) managing bibliographic data and references is an important part of their work. Sadly there are not many good tools to work with bibliographic data. There are reference managers like Zotero or Endnote but it is difficult to integrate data in other databases and websites and work collaboratively on bibliographies. Bibliographic data is rather complicated and the rules for correct display like Chicago Manual of Style are difficult and also vary a lot. Scholars, at least in the humanities, have low regard for texts and websites that show sloppily formatted references so a project will gain reputation by users by producing correct references.
 
The functions we use most: 

  • basic management and viewing of bibliographic entries in Drupal
  • CSL output
  • importing from Zotero, MARC, Endnote
  • exporting to Zotero, MARC, Endnote (not currently used)

Fabien Jouenne, SCROL

I run a personal company named SCROL and I am trying to bring solutions through Drupal to researchers. 

The first problem your module solved is the replacement of the Biblio D7 module, of course, since it won't be ported to Drupal 8. 

Having a tool to manage scientific papers is critical for my clients. They need to import papers through different IDs (DOI, PubMed), some are really specific sometimes (HAL, CNRS, France). They need to filter papers through a custom search engine (Views, Search API) and the author filter could be tricky sometimes. With BibCite, we can now use a relation to a contributor and it works nicely here. They definitely need to sort papers, first by year and secondly by first author`s last name, which is not so simple with Drupal 7`s Biblio, for example.

So, that is what my clients point really often: importing, filtering, sorting.

BOREA Laboratory

BOREA Laboratory

BOREA Laboratory

BOREA Laboratory

Alexander O’Neill, Robertson Library at the University of Prince Edward Island

I came across Bibliography & Citation when building the core platform to power scholarly journals that we are hosting here at UPEI. The main one is the Journal of L. M. Montgomery Studies. Our hope was that editors or contributors would be able to use the citation entities they imported from Refworks etc. to construct their reference lists.

It was quite helpful in the course of developing the journal to let the editors see how different citation styles looked just by switching the default in the admin interface. 

I also was able to make use of the citation formatting library to output a node as a citation in the theme layer without needing to create a separate Bibcite reference entity. 

Using Inline Entity Forms our editors can create works cited lists, and then choose from those in a dropdown while interacting with the Insert Reference Footnote CKEditor plugin. 

In practice, since the site's editors receive submissions in Microsoft Word format, that have citation lists in the text, they have not made regular use of creating Reference entities. Rather, they have mostly pasted the cited work as plain text into each footnote.

Thus the main use we ended up getting out of Bibliography and Citation was the CSL formatting functionality. 

reading_rilla_through_covid-19_journal_of_l.m._m

Journal of L. M. Montgomery Studies

We’re thinking of how a submission workflow where users can upload and edit content for submission in the site itself, then they may end up using the Bibliography and Citation features more extensively. But it's likely that the current workflow is what most authors expect to be able to do — just upload a Word file and have the editor or assistants do the formatting.

I like Bibcite's architecture, especially scalability for potentially handling a lot of citations. The other project I'm involved in is a digital preservation system called Islandora that is also Drupal-based. One subset of users of Islandora is to use it as an institutional repository. There's potential for making use of Bibcite in that space for citation formatting etc. So I am glad it is an ongoing project we may be able to benefit from.

Conclusion

Every respondent is affiliated with universities and research centers. Also, we know that BibCite is quite helpful for librarians. So, lets summarize: the project is irreplaceable in the fields of professional working with data sources that are valuable for science and humanity. If you relate to those fields too, and your website is powered by the Drupal CMS, download and install Bibliography & Citation. Our developers are ready to support and review specific issues.

Have some questions? Email us: hello@adcillc.com

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