"Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods."
-- Albert Einstein
-- Albert Einstein
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Sean appreciates the swift response of Campus Environment and Operations and the Otis Elevator Company... back in the lab now.
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Spiderbait - Black Betty
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Stow, OH, USA
software
Much of the software I write is designed for clients to meet their specific needs. However, I have written a few applications suitable for general release.
I am in the habit of using AutoIt - a free, procedural scripting language for Windows. Say what you like, it is a straightforward language which is easy to master quickly, and produces standalone executables which do not require any additional frameworks or external libraries. As a VisualBasic programmer from back in the "good old days" - i.e., when VisualBasic actually lived up to its name, before Microsoft introduced .NET - I find it is the easiest way to rapidly develop applications for a variety of purposes.
Cambridge Scientific Abstracts provides access to scientific literature for libraries and universities. Their search tools are adequate, but seriously lacking in one respect: there is no ability to sort search results by the number of times articles have been cited.
This is, in my opinion, a serious deficit. The only sorting options the CSA system provides is by date of publication and relevance rank (with respect to the latter, I'm not sure how this is calculated - sometimes it seems to work well, other times it does not), but neither necessarily has anytyhing to do with the impact a particular article, book chapter, etc. has had on the scientific community. The best way to quantify this variable is by the number of times a particular source has been cited in subsequent publications.
I wrote this application to pick up CSA's slack (and yes, I'm being critical here - in my opinion, it really is inexcusable not to have this feature; if someone from CSA would like to explain why I'm wrong, I humbly ask that they do so). The program works as follows: simply do a CSA search and click on "Save, Print, Email," then select "Full Format - no references" and APA bibliographic style. Click on "Save" and save the downloaded file to an easily accessible location on your computer (the Desktop works just fine). Launch ReferenceCounter and select the downloaded text file. The program will count the number of times each article in the saved search results is cited and present this information to you in a list. If you double-click on a particular entry in the list, the Accessation Number for that article will be copied to the clipboard; simply paste it into a search query in CSA to retrieve the article.
I am in the habit of using AutoIt - a free, procedural scripting language for Windows. Say what you like, it is a straightforward language which is easy to master quickly, and produces standalone executables which do not require any additional frameworks or external libraries. As a VisualBasic programmer from back in the "good old days" - i.e., when VisualBasic actually lived up to its name, before Microsoft introduced .NET - I find it is the easiest way to rapidly develop applications for a variety of purposes.
ReferenceCounter v0.1 (beta)
Latest release: 12/12/2008
Cambridge Scientific Abstracts provides access to scientific literature for libraries and universities. Their search tools are adequate, but seriously lacking in one respect: there is no ability to sort search results by the number of times articles have been cited.
This is, in my opinion, a serious deficit. The only sorting options the CSA system provides is by date of publication and relevance rank (with respect to the latter, I'm not sure how this is calculated - sometimes it seems to work well, other times it does not), but neither necessarily has anytyhing to do with the impact a particular article, book chapter, etc. has had on the scientific community. The best way to quantify this variable is by the number of times a particular source has been cited in subsequent publications.
I wrote this application to pick up CSA's slack (and yes, I'm being critical here - in my opinion, it really is inexcusable not to have this feature; if someone from CSA would like to explain why I'm wrong, I humbly ask that they do so). The program works as follows: simply do a CSA search and click on "Save, Print, Email," then select "Full Format - no references" and APA bibliographic style. Click on "Save" and save the downloaded file to an easily accessible location on your computer (the Desktop works just fine). Launch ReferenceCounter and select the downloaded text file. The program will count the number of times each article in the saved search results is cited and present this information to you in a list. If you double-click on a particular entry in the list, the Accessation Number for that article will be copied to the clipboard; simply paste it into a search query in CSA to retrieve the article.