Jorge A. Alfaro-Murillo wrote:
Perhaps I am biased because I learned LaTeX and BibTeX before
Org, but I think that for references BibTeX (plus a little bit
of emacs configuration) has everything I could need. I guess if
you are more used to Org, it might be worth to invest time and
come up with a org-based solution. Please keep us posted, I find
this a very interesting thread.
This is an update about my experiments so far. Please comment!
This is my current setup:
All the articles (mostly PDF files) are kept in one directory.
There’s also an index.org file in there with headlines like this
--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
**
[[file:vazifeh13-electromagnetic_response_weyl.pdf][Electromagnetic
Response of Weyl Semimetals]]
:PROPERTIES:
:TITLE: Electromagnetic Response of Weyl Semimetals
:BTYPE: article
:ID: vazifeh13-electromagnetic_response_weyl
:AUTHOR: Vazifeh, M. M. and Franz, M.
:JOURNAL: Phys. Rev. Lett.
(…)
:END:
Some comments/notes with links and in-line formulas.
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---
These entries are created by org-bibtex-yank, Emacs’ bibtex is
configured to generate the unique IDs (authorYY-three_first_words
should be sufficiently unique in practice).
This setup works pretty well:
- Adding new articles is easy (there's still ample room for
improvement).
- Opening associated the associated article files and other links
works well.
- It’s easy to add notes (with in-line maths!) and do simple
searches.
- Linking from and to other org files (agenda, project-specific
notes) is possible.
- Additional attachment files (e.g. whiteboard photos from a
discussion) can added with org-attach.
- org-bibtex provides support to put entries into project-specific
bibtex files (org-bibtex-export-to-kill-ring).
- Thanks to the non-random unique IDs, it’s possible to jump to
articles in the library from references in latex files, even if
the key scheme in the latex file differs from the one used in
index.org.
But not all is good:
- Scaling: Some simple tests seem to indicate that org mode
becomes too sluggish with files of about 50k lines. This is a
dimension that could be easily reached over 10 years if the file
grows by 20 lines per day on average. This is not a problem in
the beginning, but if the scheme does not scale to a few
thousand entries, this renders the whole idea way less
interesting.
- More advanced searching is lacking: AFAIK org mode currently
does not support searching for articles of a given author that
also contain a given keyword in the notes.
Any insights about these two problems? Perhaps the scaling could
be managed by splitting index.org into several files (by year for
example). But how to search then? It's probably not a good idea
to add all the bibliography org-files into the agenda. (Is there
a way to have a secondary list of agenda files?) Perhaps the
solution for both problems would be to write a fast commandline
query tool for such org-databases? The tool could even use a fast
cache if necessary.
