Multiple databases are available, and others may be added from time to time without updating this documentation, or the installed bibsearch software; use the --help option occasionally to find out what databases are currently installed.
The default database at the bibsearch development site at the University of Utah Mathematics Department is tug, the largest, and most active. The default may be different at your site; use the --help option to find out.
At the time of writing, these databases are available:
The archives covers these subject areas in computer science, electronic document representation, and mathematics:
- ANSI, IEC, IEEE, Internet, and ISO computer-related standards;
- American Mathematical Monthly and Canadian Journal of Mathematics == Journal canadien de mathématiques;
- computer architectures (Intel IA-64 and visual instruction sets);
- computer arithmetic;
- computer graphics and visualization;
- computer science conferences and journals (hundreds of them);
- cryptanalysis, cryptography, cryptohistory, cryptology, and encryption;
- database research;
- electronic document representation;
- fonts;
- GNU Project of the Free Software Foundation;
- HTML and SGML, and other SGML-based markup languages, such as ChemML, MathML, MusicML, VRML, and XML;
- Internet;
- Lecture Notes in Computer Science and Lecture Notes in Computational Science and Engineering;
- literate programming;
- mathematical physics (one journal only);
- numerical linear algebra;
- operating systems (GNU/Linux, Mach, Plan9, UNIX);
- page representation languages (PostScript and PDF);
- programming languages (Axiom, BMDP, Fortran, Icon, Java, Macsyma, Maple, Mathematica, PostScript, Python, Reduce, SAS, S-Plus, SPSS);
- quantum chemistry (one journal, one book series, and one personal bibliography, only);
- statistics;
- supercomputing;
- symbolic algebra;
- TeX and Metafont;
- typography and typesetting;
- Unicode; and
- the X Window System.
Multiple --bibsearchpath options accumulate, to avoid long ugly colon-separated directory lists.
Since a particular user will often want to specify the same search path each time bibsearch is run, the path can also be set as the value of the BIBSEARCHPATH environment variable. However, command-line use of --bibsearchpath overrides any BIBSEARCHPATH setting.
As a special convenience, an empty directory path element, represented by a leading or trailing colon, or two adjacent colons between directory names, is replaced by the local system default bibsearch directory search path. This makes it easy for users to augment, rather than override, the search path, and to do so without having to know what the default search path is.
Thus, a typical user setting might be
$HOME/bib:
to put the user's own databases ahead of the system ones, overriding any of those with the same names as the user's databases, or
:$HOME/bib
to put them behind the system ones, preventing hiding of the system databases.
It is possible for the directory path to include directories to which the current user does not have read access; such directories will be silently ignored. This feature is intentional: it makes it possible for individual users, or groups, to register their databases with the local bibsearch installer, who need only augment the DEFAULTBIBSEARCHPATH setting in the installed bibsearch program, so that they automatically see them when they run bibsearch. However, by suitable setting of directory permissions, they can control access by others, without having to involve local system management.
This feature is not necessarily antisocial and unfriendly. Bibliographic data is largely entered by humans, so it is highly error prone. A user might wish to have personal bibsearch access to rough bibliographic data that has not yet been polished up enough for public view. Once that cleanup happens, a simple directory permission change can instantly release the data to others on the local system.
Although it should rarely be necessary, you can also define the DEBUG environment variable to a nonempty string to turn on debugging. This lets it take effect a little earlier than if it were requested on the command line.
At the bibsearch development site, this list includes at least these: dblp, karlsruhe, mathutah, and tug.
mg(1) commands begin with an initial period, and are discussed further below.
Each search result normally begins with a separator line of dashes, followed by a World-Wide Web Universal Resource Locator (URL) address that uniquely identifies the location of the bibliography file. Here is an example, from a search for Knuth typesetting book":
---------------------------------- 65786
URL = ftp://ftp.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/font.bib Line=1453
KEYWORDS = display generation printing publishing
@Book{Knuth:1979:TMN,
author = "D. E. Knuth",
title = "{TEX} and {METAFONT}, New Directions in
Typesetting",
publisher = "Digital Press",
address = "Billerica, MA",
pages = "360",
year = "1979",
ISBN = "0-932376-02-9",
LCCN = "Z253.3 .K58 1979",
bibdate = "Tue May 12 10:13:36 1998",
bibsource = "Graphics/imager/imager.books.bib,
Graphics/siggraph/79.bib,
ftp://ftp.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/siggraph/new/79.bib",
annote = "A landmark book at the time it was
published. Newer versions exist. Less than
portable as claimed, but still significant.
Required reading for anyone doing font
design and type setting.",
keywords = "general references, standards text books,
software, programming systems, character
display/generation, Applications,
printing/publishing industry, general
references, standards text books and
software, programming systems, character
display/generation and Applications,
printing/publishing industry",
}
---------------------------------- 65934
Each output BibTeX entry is surrounded by blank lines (a paragraph in TeX) for better visibility, and to facilitate easy text selection in GNU emacs(1): put the cursor anywhere in the entry, and type M-h (mark-paragraph) then M-w (kill-ring-save) to copy the text into the editor and window system paste buffers. Text processing languages, like awk(1), icon(1), perl(1), and ruby(1), and search utilities like agrep(1) and glimpse(1), also have simple mechanisms for dealing with paragraph-sized chunks of text.
Searches always ignore letter case.
Searching is based on words, where a word is a consecutive string of letters, digits, hyphen (dash or minus), underscore, backslash, or apostrophe. This permits searching for ordinary words, as well as for ISSN and ISBN values, for programming language variable names, for TeX control sequences, and for names like ``O'Reilly''.
All other characters are treated as word separators, so to search for ``input/output'', you must search for two words, ``input'' and ``output''. Similarly, you could search for an e-mail address ``rms@gnu.org'' with the string ``rms gnu org'', assuming the default query-ranked search mode.
Partial word matches are not usually accepted: if you search for ``tex'', neither ``text'' nor ``texture'' will match. However, mg(1) will `stem' search words, removing common English suffixes, so a search for ``mathematical'' will first be reduced to ``mathemat'' and that will match ``mathematical'', ``mathematics'', and ``mathematician''. Regrettably, the current version of mgquery(1) does not provide any way to suppress this stemming, with the result that searches often return much more than you really want.
By default, bibsearch uses query-ranked searching: you type several words, and the search engine responds with a sorted list of bibliography entries that contain one or more of those words, in order of decreasing number of matches.
To switch to Boolean searching, which allows combination of words with Boolean AND (&), OR (|), and NOT (!) operators, issue the mgquery(1) command
.set query boolean
You may find that using
makes it easier to spot the matched strings in the output. However, the highlighting requires additional control characters that contaminate any output directed to a file, so in such a case, you should turn it off, by, e.g.,.set mode hilite
.set mode text .set pager "cat >>/tmp/foo.log"
At the bibsearch development site, local users can see these files directly in the UNIX network file system, without having to launch ftp(1) or a Web browser: just change the prefix ftp://ftp.math.utah.edu to /u/ftp to create a local file name. This may be handy if you want to find related bibliography entries serendipitously, without knowing exactly what they contain.
For further information on searching with mgquery(1), consult its manual pages, or use its
command..help
Finally, to exit from bibsearch, use the mgquery(1)
command..quit
With each BibTeX entry retrieved, bibsearch provides definitions of any BibTeX strings used in the entry. This will likely result in many duplicate string definitions, but they are easily eliminated by a subsequent pass of the bibliography data through bibsort(1). Acknowledgement strings are not included in this output, because they are often large, and because few, if any, BibTeX styles use them. You can find their definitions near the top of the original BibTeX file identified at the start of each search result.
Several years of experience with bibliographic data from many sources, both commercial and public, has amply demonstrated that if errors can be made, they will be! Among the common errors repeatedly seen are:
- Misspelled author names.
- Omitted accents in author names.
- Silent truncation of author lists, and in the case of one commercial database, the even worse practice of recording only the first two authors, plus the last!
- Replacement of authors after the first by the anonymous et al." . A colleague once quipped that if you hear of work credited to Jones et al., it means that Jones got the credit, but Al did the work!
Scientific document production is now mostly done electronically, so shortcuts of the past that were used primarily to reduce the tedium of manual typing of reference lists, such as omitting subsequent authors, abbreviating personal names or journal names, and eliding common digits of ending page numbers (983--7 instead of 983--987), should be abandoned. The document is now likely to preserved in electronic form by the publisher, and those shortcuts interfere with subsequent reuse, and with searching.
A few journals already hyperlink citations to entries in reference lists, and inverting those hyperlinks produces answers to the very important question, ``Who cited this article?'', a question that up to now could be answered only through Science Citation Index, or its variants in other fields.
- Reduction of author personal names to initials, sometimes without final periods, or even separating spaces. In some languages, there are human names that require only a single letter, so a serious ambiguity is introduced by this reduction.
- Misordering of author names occurs far too often. Even publishers are sometimes inconsistent here between table of contents and article.
- Omission of spaces and hyphens, and loss of capitalization, in compound names. Science Citation Index reduces Joop van der Vliet to J. Vandervliet, H. Fallah-Adl to H. Fallahadl, and S. McQueen to S. Mcqueen.
- Dropping of Jr.-like author name suffixes.
- Inconsistent handling of Chinese, Japanese, and Hungarian author names. In those languages, and possibly others, family names are given before the personal name. In the absence of bibliography markup of family names, it would be more consistent to place the family name last, e.g., Paul Erdös" , instead of Erdös Pal, and Bao-Wen Li instead of Li Bao-Wen". A future version of BibTeX may have markup syntax to address this problem, while preserving the native name order, but until then, the common European name order should be adhered to.
- Incorrect abbreviation of Spanish names, which often have a paternal family name, followed by a maternal family name, often separated by y (and). Thus, Javier Gomez Romero should not be abbreviated as J. G. Romero or Javier G. Romero" . For BibTeX use, enter such a name like this: Javier {Gomez Romero}.
- Confusion between editor and author. This is a frequent problem for journals that carry monthly columns with both a regular column editor, and an author varying by issue. Several IEEE journals do this. The BibTeX entry should list the author, not the editor.
- Errors in titles, sometimes making them unrecognizable. Part of this problem can be traced back to publishers, editors, and marketing people who prepare tables of contents with titles that only vaguely resemble the actual article titles. Some commercial databases seem to input their data almost exclusively from tables-of-contents listings, so the errors propagate.
- Changes of spelling between American and British English.
Databases should record the original data exactly, not convert it to the orthographic practices of the country where it happens to be stored!
When spelling errors occur in the original data, they can be marked with the time-honored Latin insertion [sic].
- Changing arabic numbers in titles to English, or vice-versa (a very common error in Science Citation Index).
- Errors from optical character recognition (OCR) when publication data is scanned in as bitmaps and converted to text by a computer program: ri becomes n, ni becomes m, 1 becomes l, and so on.
- Errors in year, volume, issue, month, and page numbers, and sometimes, even getting the journal completely wrong.
- Omission of publication month and, where relevant, day.
- Omission of final page numbers, even though it is required practice in many fields to include both initial and final page numbers in article citations.
- Off-by-one final page numbers, probably from faulty assumptions about whether new articles start on an odd-numbered page or not.
- Off-by-one initial page numbers from confusion over where an article starts.
Citations for the Communications of the ACM frequently exhibit this problem: since a design change in July 1990, articles often have background artwork on two facing pages, and huge and horridly scaled typefaces. The foreground and background colors and patterns often clash, to the point of being unreadable, and the weird layout of author names and titles leaves the reader thoroughly confused.
- Converting journal titles to all uppercase (a major failing of Science Citation Index).
- Dropping of punctuation: O'Neill becomes ONeill and What's New? becomes Whats New.
- Insertion of bogus hyphens between title words (a practice that is endemic in Science Citation Index).
The lack of support for accents, and for mathematical markup, is a huge problem for scientific bibliographic data. Only the American and European Mathematical Society databases, which store their data with TeX markup, routinely include accents and proper math markup, although for historical reasons, the EMS databases typically use transliterations of German accented letters. Among all the commercial databases that I have used, the quality of entries in the AMS and EMS databases is notably better than all others, and they deserve a lot of credit for that.
The attempt at representing mathematics in many other databases cannot be termed other than bizarre and incomprehensible; they don't even attempt to do something sensible, like spell out the names of the symbols, but instead, substitute utter nonsense. Yet, mathematics is common in publication titles in the physical sciences.
Speakers of largely accent-free languages, like English, tend to be insensitive to the significance of accents in other languages. In many languages, accented letters are not just variants of the base letter, they are completely different letters, with different sounds and different alphabet positions. Just as English would become unreadable if the vowels were reduced from aeiou to, say, just aiu, other languages suffer similarly when accents are lost. Here is the previous sentence with that reduction:
Just as Inglish wuuld bicumi unriadabli if thi vuwils wiri riducid frum aiiuu tu, say, just aiu, uthir languagis suffir similarly whin accints ari lust.
In view of these myriad deficiencies, what can be done?
The best way would be for commercial databases and publishers to do the job right in the first place!
Ultimately, commercial databases should get all of their data directly from publishers, instead of indirectly by retyping and/or OCR. Publishers have the original bibliographic information, and the capability to preserve that information, and make it available; at present, few do.
If publishers do not supply the correct information in rigorously-marked-up electronic form, then data should come from multiple sources and be merged in such a way that discrepancies are revealed. Commercial databases could have the data typed or scanned twice by independent contractors, for example, and then merge the results: discrepancies indicate errors. Researchers should enter bibliographic data directly from the original publications, or if those are unavailable, at least find multiple independent instances of citations to those publications.
The bibjoin(1) utility is a good example of software that can help a lot in this process. It uses a number of heuristics to maximize the data retained after a merge, and yet preserves conflicting information when it cannot decide which of multiple choices is the right one, leaving it up to a human editor to resolve discrepancies. Consult its manual pages for more information about how it operates.
However, merging of data from two sources is insufficient: both might have derived their data from inaccurate tables of contents.
For these reasons, the BibNet Project and TUG archives include data merged from several sources, and credit those sources in bibsource string values. In addition, for many recent journals, the data is derived directly by computer software from data at publisher World-Wide Web sites. For some of the larger scientific publishers, this has proved to be an acceptable approach, although confirmation from other sources is still desirable. Consequently, the tug collection in bibsearch will be found to be a substantially more reliable source than the other collections, which are mostly single source, and parts of them are very poorly and sloppily done.
The significant differences in quality is why separate databases are maintained for bibsearch, rather than merging all available data into one master database. While it is technologically feasible to do that, the user would then be unable to assess the quality of the results of a search, and the wheat could be buried in chaff.
After successful completion of the build, a fast directory renaming operation exchanges xxx/mgbuild and xxx/mgdata to make the newer one current. Since the old one remains available, just under a different directory name, open files in use by all running bibsearch or mgquery(1) jobs are unaffected.
Even when the old xxx/mgbuild tree is emptied immediately prior to the next scheduled database update, already-open files still remain available to running processes (but are no longer associated with a named file directory), so database updates never cause user search-process failure, but newly-added data will not be seen until the user search processes are restarted.
Last database update: Thu Feb 1 17:09:26 MST 2001 Bibliography entries: 278378 Bibliography lines: 5682256 Bibliography bytes: 216614068
The database build time depends critically on the performance of this program. The current version is run with mawk(1), because that proved to be several times faster than with awk(1), gawk(1), nawk(1), and even with a highly compiler-optimized translation from awk to C with awka(1)! It now accounts for about half the total CPU time of the build of the tug database, for which mgbuild(1) processes about 7MB of clean BibTeX data per minute, or 420MB per hour, on a 400MHz Sun UltraSPARC II file server.
Nelson H. F. Beebe, Ph.D.
Center for Scientific Computing
University of Utah
Department of Mathematics, 322 INSCC
155 S 1400 E RM 233
Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090
USA
Email: beebe@math.utah.edu, beebe@acm.org,
beebe@computer.org, beebe@ieee.org (Internet)
WWW URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe
Telephone: +1 801 581 5254
FAX: +1 801 585 1640, +1 801 581 4148
ftp://ftp.math.utah.edu/pub/mg/mg-1.3x http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/mg/mg-1.3x
in the files
where x.yy is the current version. Each of the popular archive format unpacks into an identical distribution tree.bibsearch-x.yy.jar bibsearch-x.yy.tar.gz bibsearch-x.yy.zip bibsearch-x.yy.zoo
That site is mirrored to several other Internet archives, so you may also be able to find it elsewhere on the Internet; try searching for the string bibsearch at one or more of the popular Web search sites, such as
http://search.microsoft.com/ http://www.altavista.com/ http://www.dejanews.com/ http://www.dogpile.com/ http://www.euroseek.net/ http://www.excite.com/ http://www.go2net.com/ http://www.google.com/ http://www.hotbot.com/ http://www.infoseek.com/ http://www.inktomi.com/ http://www.lycos.com/ http://www.northernlight.com/ http://www.snap.com/ http://www.stpt.com/ http://www.websmostlinked.com/ http://www.yahoo.com/
######################################################################## ######################################################################## ######################################################################## ### ### ### bibsearch: search BibTeX bibliography files ### ### ### ### Copyright (C) 1997, 2000 Nelson H. F. Beebe ### ### ### ### This program is covered by the GNU General Public License (GPL), ### ### version 2 or later, available as the file COPYING in the program ### ### source distribution, and on the Internet at ### ### ### ### ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/GPL ### ### ### ### http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html ### ### ### ### This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or ### ### modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as ### ### published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of ### ### the License, or (at your option) any later version. ### ### ### ### This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, ### ### but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of ### ### MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the ### ### GNU General Public License for more details. ### ### ### ### You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public ### ### License along with this program; if not, write to the Free ### ### Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, ### ### MA 02111-1307 USA ### ######################################################################## ######################################################################## ########################################################################