Is it time for a Journal of Reproducible Research? Experiments that are independently conducted in different labs that find the same outcome. This topic has been on my mind recently, and the question of reproducibility and fraud has also been in the news. Such a journal would protect against one-off results and science fraud. Continue reading
I use KBibTeX to manage my references database, but I used to use Jabref. Jabref has a handy feature that can automatically abbreviate journal names to their standard (ISO) abbreviation format. The built-in list of abbreviations is missing a lot of common biology journals, but I have updated it with many biology journals. You can get the most recent version of my abbreviations list from my Dropbox.
I have nearly every paper I’ve ever read stored in a BibTeX database, so I wrote a BASH script to build a list of citations using BibTeX that could be easily copied into LibreOffice Writer. I would prefer to write all my papers in LaTeX, but there are some disadvantages–poor adoption and inefficient track-changes methods–so I have to use LibreOffice Writer instead. None of the available bibliography managers that integrate with LibreOffice seem particularly reliable to me, and I plan to convert my manuscripts back to LaTeX anyway when I put my thesis together.
Danna Gifford 