Good timing for this discussion!

On Wed, 20 May 2015 at 17:03 Laura Robbins <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> If you're looking to compile your own data, Zotero is a great way to
> do it and provides an API.  I recently moved our faculty publications
> database into it.
>

We're embarking on a self-compilation exercise and are going the Zotero
route as well, relying on the power of student labour to take the
bibliography section of each faculty member's CV and add them to Zotero
group libraries.

I'm cobbling together a super-simple Flask-on-PostgreSQL web app that will
take the Zotero export as RIS, migrate it into a relational database, and
enable us to clean up / enrich the data from there (
https://github.com/dbs/ris2web if you want to peek at it's very early, very
much in progress state).

One thing I've learned is that I realllllllly wish is that Zotero offered
linked data authority control, so that I could assert that  this "Smith,
Jane" is either different or the same as that "Smith, Jane" at the time of
creating or editing the bibliography entry, but for now we're going to do
the deduping & URI addition after the fact. The URIs will be exposed as
RDFa in the HTML of course.


> If you're looking to compile data, though I hate to suggest it, is
> there an API for google scholar?  It's not a perfect resource, but for
> humanities and social sciences, I've found some publications for our
> faculty that they hadn't given me themselves.


There is no API for Google Scholar, alas. There is an API for Microsoft
Academic Search at http://academic.research.microsoft.com/About/Help.htm#4
which might be of interest. Haven't tried it myself.

The Mendeley API looks quite interesting as well. Wasn't aware of that,
even--thanks Bee!