Sunday, June 10, 2007

Gimme That Scientific Paper! Part II

If you're wanting to make textual lists of online references more useful for visitors to your page(s) such that you can turn references like this:

Work, Timothy T., David P. Shorthouse, John R. Spence, W. Jan A. Volney, David Langor. 2004. Stand composition and structure of the boreal mixedwood and epigaeic arthropods of the Ecosystem Management Emulating Natural Disturbance (EMEND) landbase in northwestern Alberta. Can. J. For. Res. 34(2): 417–430.

Into this:

Work, Timothy T., David P. Shorthouse, John R. Spence, W. Jan A. Volney, David Langor. 2004. Stand composition and structure of the boreal mixedwood and epigaeic arthropods of the Ecosystem Management Emulating Natural Disturbance (EMEND) landbase in northwestern Alberta. Can. J. For. Res. 34(2): 417–430.Search!

[Doesn't work here because of Blogger constraints]

Where the little magnifying glass allow visitors to your page to search for the paper without having to maintain the links, all you need to do is download this:
http://www.canadianarachnology.org/bioGUID/bioGUID.js

And follow the brief instructions in the JavaScript file. There's next to no additional mark-up required for the lists of papers (see Here in the comments section of a previous post). The script makes use of some cross-domain Flash, which requires that your domain be added to Rod Page's bioGUID reference parser. However, I included some simple php and asp examples to step around that constraint and also a link to an online file storage service where you can get all the images I used or directly accessible here: http://www.box.net/shared/685i4nyxxj#1:7066241

1 comment:

David Shorthouse said...

It occurred to me tonight that this method (OpenURL is guilty of the same) may run into a wall...or rather a ceiling...if the reference is > approx. 225 words, which would translate to roughly 2,000 characters in length (space character = %20 in a URL). Internet Explorer, unlike all other browsers, has an upper limit of ~2,080 characters. So, I just spent a few moments trying to find a really long reference...then gave-up ;)~