A suite of Web based tools has been developed to create, maintain and access lists of scientific publications. This capability facilitates the management of publication lists for geographically distributed research projects. Specialized tools built on conventional database systems usually handle scientific bibliographic data. In a distributed environment, either the full database machinery must be installed on every participating platform, or a general-purpose client-server approach must be adopted, which can be cumbersome to implement.
We chose a simpler approach that capitalizes on the standardization made possible by the universal availability of Web browsers. Using PERL as a scripting language, a system was developed specifically geared to the scientific publication list task. A guiding principle of the design is that all the data and metadata should be stored as flat text files, to ensure portability. The bibliographic information is stored as tag-value pairs similar in form to the exchange format already used for a variety of commercial bibliographic databases. The details of the format, such as what fields are allowed for different record types, are contained in a definition text file that can be modified and edited at will. The format in which selected publications are displayed or printed is governed by another text file.
The user interface is based on a set of Web forms. Modifying the forms causes the data to be read into an internal representation which is then used to sort, select, or modify the records. The results of forms used to query the database can be displayed as HTML documents. This provides the option of including URL fields that are hyperlinks to the full text or abstract of the document in the database.
The system was developed for the DOE Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Project to list and categorize all publications associated with this large multi-investigator, widely distributed project. In its initial phase, information is entered at one location, but can be universally accessed over the Web. Further developments should permit individual investigators to do the primary entry of their own contributions filtered through an editing process before being publicly available.
This research was performed under the auspices of the United States Department of Energy
under Contract No. DE-AC02-98CH10886