Re: emacs & org mode for scholars questions

[John Kitchin <jkitchin@andrew.cmu.edu>]

(personal bias warning;) I think org-ref+helm-bibtex is a best in class
solution to citation management for org-mode/LaTeX users. It provides
functional cite links that connect to web of science, scopus, pubmed,
and others. It provides utilities to download bibtex and org-bibtex
entries from a doi, and also to download the pdf if it knows how. It
also provides a lot of bibtex utilities to change title cases, etc... It
provides some limited support for export to other formats like html, but
that is an area that certainly could be improved, as well as support for
other formats. It would be nice to consider expanding the bibliography
database formats supported (this would also require expanding the export
code).

There is a cite element that has been developed in org-mode that may one
day supercede the link based approach that org-ref uses. Much of the
functionality of org-ref could be retained when that happens.

What would make it even better? Integrated smart search, e.g. find other
documents that cite a reference, find similar documents/references based
on what you have written.

Most important maybe: figure out how to merge narrative text in version
control! I don't want to write a sentence per line just to use the
default merge with git. I really want a word-based track-change like
diff, and merge.

Erik Hetzner writes:

> Hi all,
>
> I am going to be giving a talk on how Emacs can help support scholars,
> especially those who are using plain text and doing reproducible
> research, at “Emacsconf 2015” in San Francisco this Saturday (the
> 29th).
>
> I have done some work on managing references using Emacs & pandoc, but
> what I’d like to focus on in this talk is why Emacs is a great tool
> for scholarly writers (both scientists and humanists) and what Emacs
> developers should be concentrating on to make it an even better tool
> for the scholarly community.
>
> I’m wondering if you any of you might have any suggestions about what
> you would like to see Emacs do better to support the scholarly writing
> community.
>
> Thanks for any help you can provide!
>
> best, Erik Hetzner

--
Professor John Kitchin
Doherty Hall A207F
Department of Chemical Engineering
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
412-268-7803
@johnkitchin
http://kitchingroup.cheme.cmu.edu