Introducing Autocite!

Labmeeting is all about taking information you already have (like the papers you read) and making that information more useful to you by helping you to explore it.

Autocite is the newest tool we’ve created along these lines.  It takes plain text bibliographies and figures out which citations on PubMed the text refers to.  To be concrete, I type in:

Montgomery, MK, S Xu, A Fire (1998)   RNA as a target of double-stranded RNA-mediated genetic interference in Caenorhabditis elegans.    Proc Natl Acad Sci    95: 15502-15507.

which I just lifted out of someone’s CV here, and it gives back:

Montgomery MK, Xu S, Fire A. 1998. “RNA as a target of double-stranded RNA-mediated genetic interference in Caenorhabditis elegans“. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

The great thing about this is that you can apply it in all sorts of ways to making your life easier as a researcher.  If you’re reading a document with a big long bibliography, you can copy and paste the bibliography into Autocite and immediately have a list of links to abstracts and full text for all the articles.  Or, if you have a webpage of your own with a list of your own past published works, you can automatically convert the plain text list into the HTML that you would use to link to the abstracts so that people who read your page can more easily find things out about your work.

We’re excited about Autocite and we’d love to get feedback from everyone who uses it.  Give it a try!