Table 1

Feature comparison

Management of personal collections

Full-text search

Bibliography-PDF match automated

Personal annotations

Shared collections

Approximate search patterns

Search with synonyms

Index browsing

Ease of I/O with external tools10

Free use or open-source

Requirements


BibGlimpse

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

No

No

Yes/Yes

Yes11

Bash, Perl, Apache


Abstracting services


PubMed

Prt1

No

Prt3

No

No

No

Prt

Yes

No/Yes

Yes

Web


ISI Web of

Prt1

No

No

No

No

No

No

Yes

No/Yes

No

Web


Science Search engine


Google Scholar

No

Yes2

Prt3

No

No

No

No

No

No/No

Yes

Web


Reference managers


EndNote

Yes

No

No4

Yes

No

No

No

Prt

No/Yes

No

Win/Mac


RefBase

Yes

No

No

Yes

Yes

No

No

Yes9

No/Yes

Yes

XAMPP12


iPapers

Yes

Yes

No5

Yes

No

No

No

No

No/Yes

Yes

Mac


Social bookmarking


CiteULike

Yes

No

No6

Prt7

Yes

No

No

Tags

No/Prt

Yes

Web


Connotea

Yes

No

No6

Yes

Yes

No

No

Tags

No/Prt

Yes

Web


Digital library


Greenstone

Yes

Yes

No

Yes8

Yes8

Yes

No

Yes

Yes/Yes

Yes

Perl, Apache


Feature comparison between BibGlimpse and other bibliographic software tools. 'Prt' indicates that a feature is partly supported. 1 Searches and selected references can be stored in collections. 2 Covers the first 120 kB of open access papers and a non-disclosed list of publishers; all recent articles by Elsevier publications are, e.g., excluded. PubMed is indexed with a lagtime of up to a year. 3 Linking bibliography to full text; not the other way around. 4 For a given reference an automated online search for the corresponding full-text can be performed. 5 Requires file named PMID.pdf, where PMID is the PubMed ID, to download bibliography from PubMed. 6 Needs link to website, not link to PDF. Retrieval is not generic, but publisher site tailored. 7 Notes are not searchable. 8 Greenstone is a tool to build digital libraries, so library needs to be designed first. 9 MySQL database can be queried directly by passing MySQL search strings. 10 Input means that results of external tools can easily be input into the system for subsequent integrated analysis and searches. Output means that data in the system can be output to external tools. 11 Code free for non-profit and academic use. 12 Package providing PHP, MySQL and Apache for different platforms.

Tüchler et al. BMC Bioinformatics 2008 9:406   doi:10.1186/1471-2105-9-406

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