Bibliography management with Free/Open Source Software (FOSS)

I used to use EndNote in Windows and Macintosh. As a PhD student I have 861 records in my archive, and this data-set is extremely important to me. Giving up EndNote was what I dreaded most about giving up commercial operating systems.

But I found Zotero.

It is a little weird, because it is a plugin for Firefox. But:
1. It imported all 861 records from an Endnote, in the RIS export format.
2. It imported all the data from each record; it even turned LOC keywords into tags.
3. Since it is a plugin for Firefox, you can go to the Library of Congress website ( http://catalog.loc.gov ), look up a reference, and then save it directly into Zotero by clicking a button. That button appears in the URL field (the address field of the browser) when Zotero determines that it can parse the format of the record, whether it is a book, news article, filmstrip, etc. Zotero only works on a few sites at the moment but LOC will serve my purposes for now.

How to import Endnote records into Zotero:

In Endnote (version X1, March 2008):
   1. Open Endnote Database in Windows.
   2. In the command bar, Select Edit -> Output Styles -> Open Style Manager
   3. Select RIS
   4. In the command bar, Select File -> Export...
   5. Save the file (e.g. EndNoteLibrary.txt) in a location that you can find from Linux. In Ubuntu 7.10 that means having your Windows partition mounted. Today, by default, Ubuntu mounts it at:  /media/sda1/.

At others have noted, Endnote has supported Unicode (UTF-8 character encoding format) since version 9. So diacritics (umlauts, cedillas, etc) will be saved. Most recent Linux distros and applications use UTF-8 by default, so from here on forward special diacritics should be handled like any other characters; but for a few years we will need to deal with legacy files in weird formats.

Other FOSS biblio management software

I tried Pybliographer and Referencer, which did not seem to work at all, and then Bibus. (I did not try the BibTeX format because I decided I want to develop my papers as HTML documents instead, and eventually stitch them together as part of the final draft stages). Bibus works fine as a standalone bib-mgmt application, and it integrates with OpenOffice Writer much as Endnote does with MS Word. But it has several faults:

1. It did not import my Endnote archive easily. There seem to be 'idiosyncrasies' in my Endnote archive so even though I exported correctly in REFER format, Bibus would only import 38 of 861 records from the full export. I then exported the archive in 24 smaller chunks (about 40 records each), and Bibus imported 20 of them, but then I had to go back and re-export the remaining records in smaller chunks, etc. It took hours.

2. Bibus did not take in all the information from the Endnote export, such as ISBN and Keywords.