There’s inter­est­ing times ahead for any­one want­ing to hook ref­er­ence man­agers into Word­Press blog­ging software.

First up there’s now a Google Group for devel­op­ing sci­entific plu­gins for Word­Press. In this case sci­ence means aca­demic because a lot of the tools are basic research tools. If you’re inter­ested in using Word­Press as a schol­arly tool this is the first place to hang out. The next should be Mar­tin Fenner’s web­log Gobbledy­gook.

Mar­tin Fenner’s been chan­ging a lot of my ideas about cita­tions. The biggest idea is that cita­tions are links. They’re spe­cial­ised links, but they are links. So you could handle them via WordPress’s links tools. That’s the think­ing behind his Bib­TeX to links plu­gin. This adds a link to a cita­tion, if the cita­tion can be paired with a DOI or URL. Once you have a link in your sys­tem you need to get it back out again and this is done with his Link to Link plu­gin. This plu­gin adds a but­ton to the text editor. Click on it and you can quickly search for the link/reference you’re look­ing for and add it to the blog post. I like this a lot, but it doesn’t com­pile a bib­li­o­graphy at the end of the post, which would be nice.

At the other end there’s Zot­press. It requires some func­tions on your server so install­a­tion could be either very smooth or impossible. Zot­press adds a (zot­press) short­code (ima­gine those were square brack­ets) for adding a bib­li­o­graphy. It can pull up to 99 ref­er­ences from your Zotero account. There’s all sort of options so (zot­press collection_id=“ABCDEF”) will pull all the cita­tions from a col­lec­tion with that iden­ti­fier. These aren’t intu­it­ive, so you’ll need to open a new tab look­ing at zot­press in your dash­board to see them. The down­side is you don’t insert cita­tions inline like Link to Link. What you could do though is tag the cita­tions you want to com­pile into a bib­li­o­graphy. If you tag them post20110217 then (zot­press tag_name=“post20110217”) would format the bib­li­o­graphy. I’m not sure if that helps writ­ing that much. I prefer to write and cite, but it’s well worth keep­ing an eye on this plugin.

The one that does (almost) everything I want is kcite. kcite uses short­codes too, so (cite source=‘doi’)10.1021/jf904082b(/cite) inserts a foot­note to a bib­li­o­graphic sec­tion and uses Cross­Ref to format the bib­li­o­graphic data from the DOI. There’s a demo of it here. It’s a very neat write and cite sys­tem if everything has a DOI. If it doesn’t then you can use PMIDs from PubMed. Oth­er­wise you’re stuck for now.

I think Jason Hoyt at Mendeley has also writ­ten a plu­gin for Word­Press for insert­ing links to Mendeley entries for papers, but I haven’t seen that live yet. He has how­ever writ­ten a plu­gin that searches for related papers based on the tags you use in posts, which is poten­tially a very power­ful tool if people start tag­ging research papers in your field.

Mar­tin Fenner’s Link to Link

What makes this excit­ing is that these are all tools that are being developed right now. For example Mar­tin Fenner’s Link to Link plu­gin has been updated to pro­duce kcite friendly code, as well as CiTO. Another fea­ture I like about Mar­tin Fenner’s approach is that it’s manager-agnostic. At the moment I prefer Mendeley, but if Zotero Stan­dalone works it’s pos­sible I could move back to that. How­ever, with Bib­TeX import into Word­Press I could use Mendeley, Zotero, CiteU­Like or Bib­sonomy and still have some­thing I could use with Word­Press to write.

The other thing is that these are all GPL tools, which means I can poke around the source code and dis­trib­ute my own alter­a­tions. For example if I can get my head around how kcite works, there’s noth­ing to stop me writ­ing addi­tional code using World­Cat as a source for data from ISBNs. Brows­ing the kcite code, it looks do-able, though it’s now one o’clock in the morn­ing here and I won’t be home from work till 8pm so not tonight.