BibDesk

See hacks for info about pre-requisites and source code. Also see researchr about how I integrate BibDesk with Skim and DokuWiki.

BibDesk is a great open source citation management tool for Mac, which uses Bibtex as its native format. This page is for documenting some of the little tools and scripts I've created to make my use of BibDesk more effective.

It can be useful to have a quick look at PDFs in BibDesk, to make sure you downloaded the correct one, for example.

qlmanage -p <filename>

displays any file, just like if you had pressed Space in the Finder. All the script does is get the file URI of the currently highlighted publication in BibDesk, and launch QuickLook.

Connect bibdesk-qlook.rb to for example Alt+Space.

I try to maintain a library of PDFs for all my citations. BibDesk also does not automatically download the PDF when important from Google Scholar internally, or using Zot2bib. I wrote two scripts, one (gscholar.rb) which I run through Ctrl+Alt+Cmd+G, which runs a Google Scholar search on the title and author of the currently selected citation, and displays the titles of the hits with PDFs. It also writes these URLs to a temporary file.

The second script (gscholar-y.rb) is launched with a command line option, and is tied to Alt+Ctrl+Cmd+1…9 (ie. Ctrl+Alt+Cmd+2 would run “gscholar-y.rb 2”). This script checks the temporary file for the URL, downloads it, and asks BibDesk to autolink it (which on my system moves it to a specific folder, and changes the name to [citekey].pdf, for example scardamalia1999knowledge.pdf).

Screencast