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A blue social bookmark and publication sharing system.

FAQ - Overview

FAQ

General [up]
What if I have forgotten my password?
Just go to the password reminder page and enter your username and the e-mail address you used for registering at BibSonomy. After confirming the security code (Captcha) we will send you an e-mail with a temporary password with which you can log in and change your password.
How can I delete my BibSonomy account?
To delete your account, please follow these steps:
  • Log in on the BibSonomy homepage.
  • Click the settings link in the top right corner of the page.
  • The delete my account paragraph allows you to delete your user account.
Importing and Exporting Data [up]
Is it possible to import my data from del.icio.us?
Yes, it is possible via the settings page where you can find the imports tab. There you can enter your username and password and all your del.icio.us bookmarks will be imported.
Is it possible to import my Firefox bookmarks?
Yes, it is possible via the settings page where you can find the imports tab.
Is it possible to import my local BibTeX files?
Yes, it is possible via the post BibTeX page where you can upload a file. Please choose the right character encoding and select who may view the BibTeX items. If a BibTeX entry has a field tag = "tagA tagB tagC" or keywords = "tagA tagB tagC", then these tags are imported and show up on the summary page which appears after uploading the file. There you can enter a set of tags for every imported BibTeX entry. The system assigns the tag imported to every BibTeX entry without a tag.
If the tags in your BibTeX file are not separated by whitespace (but by comma, e.g.) you can change this by clicking on the options link below the upload form on the post BibTeX page.
Can I export my basket BibTeX entries without logging in?
The basket function was not intended to be public. You can have a similar public function by adding the tag "basket" to posts and clicking on this tag. To export your BibTeX entries to your basket, you can use wget. There's a simple workaround to access the basket: just give wget the Cookie file of your browser, e.g.: 
wget --load-cookies=/home/rja/.mozilla/firefox/xyz1234.default/cookies.txt http://www.bibsonomy.org/bib/basket
and then you get all your publications in your basket.
Can I upload my papers as pdf, ppt, pps or doc and make them available for public usage?

Unfortunately, BibSonomy does not support this due to privacy concerns. We only support a private copy which can be shared within a group.

A way to work around this is the following: you upload your pdf etc. on your own server and then add a link from the publication to the pdf by using the url field.

User Interface [up]
Is the bookmark/publication entry directly usable after the upload into the system?
Yes and No. Most of the functions can be used directly. You can view and browse a new entry. But the entry cannot be found in searches directly as the database is periodically updated.
Do I have to type every tag I want to use each time?
No. Your tag cloud on the right-hand side, as well as the tags of an item you may be copying, are clickable in the posting form. This means that clicking on a tag in the tag cloud while posting an entry allows you to add that tag to the post.
What are those input fields used for?
On a typical BibSonomy page, there are three input fields:
Top left:
The paths shown in the top left corner such as BibSonomy::user::schmitz::[input field] can be completed by typing a tag (in this example), a user, or a group. into the input field.
Top middle:
The input field in the top right corner is used for full-text post searches. The search can be restricted to the posts by a particular user by specifying user:username as a search term, or by choosing a respective entry from the dropdown list.
Above the tag cloud:
This field can be used to filter the tags shown in the tag cloud. Just type ahead and only those tags containing the text you typed will be shown in the cloud.
Can I search for multiple terms or tags at the same time?
Yes. Just type more than one tag or term in the tag search field (top left) or the full-text search field (top middle). The search results will include all posts that contain all of the tags or terms.
Can I search for multiple terms using disjunction?
Yes. Though this feature is not provided by a specific URL scheme, it can be achieved by invoking BibSonomy's concept function. You can define relations between tags in the form of SUPERTAG < - SUBTAG. These relations can be used to retrieve resources. For example, the URL http://www.bibsonomy.org/concept/tag/ontology shows all posts which are tagged with ontology OR one of its subtags. A more detailed explanation can be found in our Feature of the Week posts.
What does the basket menu item do?
You may have noticed the button titled pick below publication posts. You can use this button to collect a number of publications, which can then be downloaded as one BibTeX file from the basket.
Which items appear on the "popular" page?
The popular page shows those 100 items which have been tagged most often within the last 5,000 posts and is updated every 15 minutes. This means that the absolute counts of posts for the items do not necessarily have to be in the order of the popular page, as it only considers the most recently posted items.
Can I delete all/several entries at once?
Yes, you can delete several of your own entries by clicking on the "edit" button which is shown in the top right menu above your bookmarks or publications of your Web page. You will be forwarded to a new page where you can find an option to delete all posts of the previous page. For instance, if you want to delete your imported publications, tagged with "imported", click on your tag "imported" so that all entries which have been tagged with this keyword are shown on one page. Then, click on the edit button and select the "delete posts" button. If you want to remove all of your entries, go to "myBibSonomy" and enable the system to show all your entries (e.g. by extending the URL with "?items=1000"). Then, click on the "edit" button. Note that you can only remove your own entries.
What is the difference between "related" and "similar" tags?
For tag-based navigation purposes, we provide two kinds of tags: related tags are those tags which were assigned together to a post. If e.g. a user has tagged a post with java and programming, then those two tags are related. Similar tags on the other side are computed by a more complex similarity measure coming from the research on information retrieval, namely cosine similarity in the vector of the popular tags. Similar tags are in many cases synonym tags. See our help pages for a more detailed explanation.
Groups and Privacy [up]
Is it possible to have private posts?
Yes, just select private in the viewable for dropdown box when you post a bookmark or a publication. Private posts will only be visible to the user who posted them.
Is it possible to have a group of users sharing public and private resources?
Yes. Just create a user account with the desired group name and write an e-mail to . We will then make this user the group admin.
There are two aspects of groups:
Seeing everything posted by group members:
Everything you post with public visibility will then be visible under all groups you belong to. This can be used to publicly present a group of users under a common name (which can be found under the groups link).
Restricting access to group members:
You can choose to post content with visibility restricted to members of a certain group. If you select a group when posting, only members of that particular group will be able to see that content.
What do you mean by "friends"?
Each user can state that some other users are his friends on the friends page. Links can be posted so that they are visible for the friends of the posting user only.
Why are my private posts not visible on some pages?
Except on user or group specific pages, only public posts are visible on all pages.
Can I make posts available for multiple groups?
No. For performance reasons, each post belongs to exactly one group (public, private, friends being special groups, too). For a workaround, refer to the next question.
Will the posts be lost for a group if the user leaves?
Posts made by a user are lost if he or she decides to cancel his or her account. In order to prevent the loss of group knowledge, posts can be automatically copied to one or more groups which the posting user is a member of by attaching the special tag for:groupname to a post. This causes the post to be copied automatically to the respective group.
Can I post to a particular group by default?
Yes, but you'll have to hack the Javascript in the post button for this. Just append +'&group=mygroup' (where mygroup is the group you want to use) to the Javascript code of the button.
Handling Publications [up]
Is it possible to upload a BibTeX snippet from a web site?
Add this button to the links toolbar of your browser and go to the web site of interest. Then mark the BibTeX source code on the web site and upload the snippet by clicking the button. You will be redirected to the usual post page but the system has parsed the snippet and filled out the form.
We have also implemented some scrapers which enable you to use the post publication button on pages without explicit BibTeX source code. For an overview on supported services have a look at the scraper info page.
Is there a way to get a nicely formatted output for my publication?
Just put /publ after the hostname on any page, which shows resources, for example: http://www.bibsonomy.org/publ/tag/web. There are several other layouts available, just click on the more button on the top of each page to access them.
What if I post the same BibTeX entry twice?
If you post exactly the same BibTeX entry twice, the duplicate will be detected and you will be offered a form for merging the two. Minor changes outside the entry type, title, author, editor, booktitle, journal, key and year fields will not be considered.
For the popular page and similar purposes, there is a weaker form of duplicate detection that tries to find as many similar publications as possible, so that the social effect of having similar interests can be exploited. For this kind of duplicate detection, only author, title and year are considered in a normalized form (e.g. excluding spaces, non-word characters and punctuation).
Can I download all of my publications at once?
A user who is logged in can use the BibTeX button at the top of the page to download the currently selected number of his BibTeX entries as one file. To get all (e.g., 1000) entries just append '?items=1000' at the end of the current URL.
Get a benchmark dataset of BibSonomy [up]
How can I get a dataset of BibSonomy?
We offer a benchmark dataset in form of an SQL dump to interested people. Before you get access to our dataset, you have to sign up our license agreement and send it via fax to our office.
Additionally, we would like to ask you to subscribe to the BibSonomy-Research mailing list. Upon receipt of your faxed license agreement, we will approve the subscription request and in the welcome mail you will get instructions on how to access the dataset.
Can I use the dataset for publications?
Of course, you can! We are quite interested in results, therefore please inform us about your publications by using the BibSonomy dataset. Concerning citing this data in publications, please refer to the following reference:

Knowledge and Data Engineering Group, University of Kassel: Benchmark Folksonomy Data from BibSonomy, version of June 30th, 2007.

If you want to refer to the system, please use the following publication:

Andreas Hotho, Robert Jäschke, Christoph Schmitz, and Gerd Stumme. BibSonomy: A Social Bookmark and Publication Sharing System. In Aldo de Moor, Simon Polovina, and Harry Delugach, editors, Proceedings of the Conceptual Structures Tool Interoperability Workshop at the 14th International Conference on Conceptual Structures, Aalborg, Denmark, July 2006. Aalborg University Press.

You can find further information here.

JabRef Integration [up]
How can I change the keyword delimiter within JabRef?
JabRef allows the specification of a delimiting character for the keywords (or tags) entered into the "keywords"-field. You can change this setting at:
Options > Preferences > Groups
There you find a textbox labeled "When adding/removing keywords, separate them by", into which you can insert your desired delimiter. Please note that within BibSonomy, no spaces are allowed in keywords. This is why the following steps are applied when uploading a post to BibSonomy:
  1. Split the contents of the "keywords"-field based on the specified JabRef keyword delimiter
  2. From each resulting part, remove space and other whitespace characters
In general, we recommend to use a space character as separator.
When uploading posts to via JabRef to BibSonomy, all my keywords are concatenated to a single tag. What am I doing wrong?
You may have specified a wrong delimiting character; see this FAQ entry for more details.