What will Citeline do for me?
Citeline is a tool which will turn a publication list in BibTeX format into a visual exhibit; the end product is an HTML file which you can download to your computer and publish however you decide. The exhibit can be in your choice of several different layout templates, facet selection and item views. Viewers will be able to easily browse through the list and sort or view subsets of the list based on various facets of the citations. To better understand what the output of Citeline can look like, see a sample exhibit.
What will Citeline *NOT* do for me?
Citeline is not intended to be a tool to maintain a database of references or format a bibliography for a paper. However, the MIT Libraries do support several software packages which offer that functionality; for more information see our Overview of Bibliographic Software (but be aware that link might change soon).
Is Citeline intended to be used only by MIT people?
Not at all!
While Citeline was built by the MIT Libraries out of the needs of the MIT community, its services are freely available to everybody and everybody is encouraged to use it (and spread the word about it) if they find it useful.
What can I do with the file I’ve created?
Citeline allows you to download an HTML page with all of the customizations you’ve made. This page can be published anywhere a regular HTML page would: as part of a personal website, as a reading list on a course page, as part of a department page, etc. You can also transfer it just as with any file, via email, USB drive, etc.
Why should I sign in?
While it is possible to use Citeline without signing in, doing so allows you to save the configurations, the settings, the layout changes that you've made to your exhibit and return later to modify them, or update the data using Zotz. It also gives you the ability to manage more than one exhibit. For more information on using the account features of Citeline, see Account Functionality in the Citeline User's Guide.
Where do I get a BibTeX file?
Most databases offer the option to export citations in BibTeX format. In ISI’s Web of Science, for example, BibTeX is one of the options under “other reference software.”
You can also export citations into BibTeX format from bibliographic software like EndNote and Refworks.
In EndNote, open the library of references that you would like to export to BibTeX. In the drop-down menu in the toolbar at the top of the screen, click "Select Another Style..." and in the list that appears, choose BibTeX Export. Now you should see the BibTeX-formatted citation in the preview screen. From the File menu, select Export. Change the name of the file that you are saving to filename.bib, then click Save.
In RefWorks, move all of the references that you'd like to put into Citeline into a separate folder. Go to the References menu and select Export. In the drop-down menu, choose the folder that contains the references you just selected. From the list of export types, click the radio button next to BibTeX - RefWorks ID. Now click Export to Text File. A text file containing information for each of your references should appear (if it doesn't, click Download It). From the File menu, select Save Page As. Change the name of the file that you are saving to filename.bib, then click Save.
How do I use Citeline from Zotero?
Zotero does not ship with support for Citeline, but we have written our own Zotero extension called Zotz that allows you to drive the creation of an Exhibit of your citations through Citeline.
First, install Zotz in the browser that runs your Zotero instance.
After having restarted your browser, open Zotero like you normally do. You'll note that the gear dropdown menu in the Zotero toolbar now features a new entry labeled Export to Citeline.
In order to create an Exhibit through Citeline, select a collection in Zotero (or even entire library!) then click the Export to Citeline command in the Zotero gear dropdown menu. Zotz will open Citeline in a new tab and inject the proper data in it, then you can continue using Citeline like you would normally do.
Some or all my entries are missing in the exhibit created from an EndNote export. What's wrong?
EndNote is known to generate ill-formed BibTeX exports if your references don't contain text in the label field. Without the label field populated, a series of linked fields in the output style are ignored by the EndNote exporter, resulting in a BibTeX file that is missing the type and the author fields. Once some text is added to the EndNote label field, the output was properly generated and Citeline can create the proper exhibit.
Another problem that may arise in the exported BibTeX file you generate with EndNote is that some entries in your Exhibit may show the year as the word "Year" instead of the actual year.
One way to fix this is to edit the BibTeX Export style or make a copy of it (Edit | Output Styles| BibTeX Export), rename it using Save As BibTeX Export Citeline, and make the following minor changes. Where you see "`year = `{`|`Year`|`}" at the end of each type section, remove "`|`" preceding and following the word Year, so the result is this: `year = `{Year} Save the file. All subsequent exports will correctly insert the date in the Year field.
Why BibTeX instead of my favorite format?
Citeline stores its internal data in RDF and there is very little BibTeX-specific about its internal architecture. We have decided to start using BibTeX because many citation management software use BibTeX directly or can export it. Sure, BibTeX has tons of quirks and its format was never officially standardized, but, as a starting point, it's the single citation management format that gives as much coverage as possible. Note that Citeline uses Babel to convert data from various formats to RDF, so if you're interested in Citeline being able to consume your format, talk to us and we might be able to accept your patches to Babel and enable it.
Does Citeline support diacritics and special characters?
Citeline supports non-Roman characters, i.e. diacritics and special characters, using standard LaTeX encoding practice(see http://www.agu.org/meetings/mtabsLTX.html for examples of these). While BibTeX doesn't officially support UTF-8, Citeline tries to support BibTeX that is UTF-8 encoded by interpreting its input as UTF-8 and converting the non-ASCII characters to the TeX "\uXXXX" notation. However there are known bugs with this conversion and with the display of non-ASCII characters. If necessary, you can convert your UTF-8 BibTex into the standard LaTeX encodings using conversion tools like 'recode' http://www.gnu.org/software/recode/.
SPECIAL NOTE ON CITELINE'S DIACRITIC SUPPORT USING ZOTERO/ZOTZ
We don't know exactly how Zotero encodes BibTeX on export, and in particular how it encodes diacritics and special characters, since there is no standard way to do that in BibTeX. We also believe that Zotero's export encoding has changed over time, since Citeline was written. The most common problem reported is that certain diacritics (e.g. Université) come through as ???? (e.g. Universit??) in Citeline since the Zotero export encoding was not correctly interpreted.
The long-term fix for this is to come to some understanding with the Zotero developer community about how it will handle diacritics and special characters on export, and then the Citeline developers can fix the code to interpret non-Latin characters correctly. There are no concrete plans to do this now, but we hope to get to it before too long.
Does Citeline work with browsers other than Firefox?
Our intention is that any browser should be able to view a Citeline bibliography, and that major browsers (Firefox, Netscape, Safari, IE) be capable of creating Citeline bibliographies. However, at the moment Citeline does not work with the IE browser: you can't create or view Citeline Exhibits with IE, because of differences in the way Firefox and IE process Javascript (the programming language behind Citeline). We consider this to be a bug, and will fix it as soon as we can (and unless someone else beats us to it).
