If I’m going to be dealing with large amounts of academic papers then a reference manager will be useful. Checked (as usual) Wikipedia for a good list of possibilities. Needs to be:- free, run locally, FOSS (philosophical point) BibTex compliant, good range of import/export, and able to interact with open office 3.x, interact with OU library(?) Jabref looks good, stable and developed. Seems to be complemented across the web. So install via the Ubuntu repositories (slightly out of date 2.3 against 2.5 but its a whole lot easier…)

OU library connection

Do a search on OU library for Brooks’ “no silver bullet” as an example. Select the checkbox in the results list and select “Export/Save” at the top of the list, choose “In format compatible with EndNote, ProCite, etc” and save the text to disk. In Jabref, select “File”,”Import into current database” and import the file. Jabref creates an entry. In Jabref selecting the Brooks reference and “open URL” will open the OUs’ catalogue (“find it at OU SFX”) entry. So you’ll need to use the OU results index or elsewhere to get an actual copy of the article. Save that copy in the directory JabRef will look for PDFs (check in preferences) and a link can be manually made between the PDF and the reference by Editing the entry + “General” tab. A more automatic linkage can be made by naming the copy the same as the BibTex key, eg brooks1987.pdf Doing the same process and importing a more recent paper gives a better result. “open URL” will get directly to the PDF to download, but it still needs to be stored locally and connected to the entry. So I think the smoothness depends on how well the paper can be directly accessed. All in all a bit cut’n’paste. Couldn’t OU simply export the results in BibTex? That could be pasted into Jabref and be quicker. Or perhaps Jabref could accept an “import via clipboard” (that can’t be difficult - I’ll dig into the source. One hack coming up…. connection with google scholar

Set google preferences to know about Open Uni - sometimes a “Find it at OU” link comes up, most times not. Not that it really helps simply pointing to the SFX entry. Can also set the scholar preferences to provide a BibTex entry which can be simply pasted into JabRef to create the entry. But again it seems to be the same issue of downloading a copy and then linking it to the reference entry. good references

Seems to be a bit of a knack to get a good populated reference. Seems best to get as close as possible to the source or publisher and get the best entry you can. Saves having to tidy up your own DB later! So in google use the “All x versions” link to do that. Jabref has plenty of fields to annotate and keyword the article which will be good. Overall it seems managing your reading is a significant housekeeping task which is frustrating since it’s all so technically possible…