[seqfan] Re: standard format for refs in OEIS?

[Charles Greathouse]

One thing that I like about Bibtex is its separation of the reference
itself from the actual mentions. I can see many advantages of doing
similarly. For example, just today I saw a reference to a paper "to be
published in J. Aust. Math. Soc." and looked up its bibliographic
information. I had to change it on 11 sequences. If the information was
collected together in one place it might have been possible to change it in
that place and have all 11 update immediately.

I think Tony's suggestion is one way of going about this.

I don't know how much the exact format matters. We might have a database
with fields like title, journal, link, doi, etc. which could be populated
in many ways, including filling out a form and parsing a Bibtex upload.

Charles Greathouse
Analyst/Programmer
Case Western Reserve University


On Mon, Jan 14, 2013 at 3:25 PM, Neil Sloane <njasloane at gmail.com> wrote:

> At present the references in the OEIS (to papers, books etc) are not in a
> uniform format, nor are the links.
>
> If we were to put them into a uniform style, what should we use?
> Bibtex format is one possibility, but is that the best? It is pretty
> ancient, is there something more recent?
>
> Here are some of the goals (there are many others):
> - make it clear what the start of the last name is, for sorting [Smith,
> Jon as opposed to John Smith]
> - make it possible to link with the Zentralblatt or Math Sci Net (MSN)
> databases so the we can add Zbl or MSN links
> - include URLs for documents that are on the web
> - if we can get it to work, the OEIS software would then make any
> reference that had a URL into an active link - then we could get rid of the
> difference between Reference (%D) lines and Link (%H) lines [Tricky because
> many of the links now are to entries in the Index to the OEIS - so that
> would have to be one of the fields in the Bibtex entry, if we decide on
> Bibtex]
> - to be compatible with Russ Cox's search mechanism, so that one could for
> example specify a search for papers by Smith that appeared in 1983.
>
> I like the way Bibtex separates all the different parts of a reference
> into fields. If we were to use that, we would probably string all the
> separate fields together into one long line.
>
> Whatever we decide, the conversion will take a while - we have 220000
> sequence entries, 60000 references and 140000 links.
> Which is why it is important to choose the right format before we start
> converting.
>
> In short, thinking about the future of the OEIS, what format (Bibtex?)
> should we use for references and links?
>
> Neil Sloane
>
> --
> Dear Friends, I have now retired from AT&T. New coordinates:
>
> Neil J. A. Sloane, President, OEIS Foundation
> 11 South Adelaide Avenue, Highland Park, NJ 08904, USA
> Phone: 732 828 6098; home page: http://NeilSloane.com
> Email: njasloane at gmail.com
>
>