Chapter 14. Tools for reference and notes management
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## Chapter 14. Tools for reference and notes management

The following tasks can be performed with the tools described in this chapter:

- Manually add, update, and delete reference entries

- Search for and display reference entries

- Search for and display authors and keywords

- Include existing references into personal reference list

- Convert reference data from various formats to RIS

We'll first introduce the command-line client refdbc, RefDB's own multi-purpose reference and notes management client, along with the reference data converters that you can use along with it. The following sections explain the input and output data formats as well as the query language used by RefDB.

## Tools

The first subsection explains the usage of the command-line client refdbc.

Whenever you have an electronic source for reference data, you should use these instead of typing datasets from scratch. Reference data come in a variety of formats. Therefore RefDB ships with a few conversion utilities which are discussed in this chapter. These utilities create tagged RIS data from the input data.

### Note

Please visit Chris Putnam's Bibutils project for another set of bibliographic data converters. These tools allow to convert a few additional formats like ISI and MODS to RIS which can then be imported by RefDB.

Since version 0.9.3, RefDB supports risx as an additional native input format. You can employ the standard techniques of SGML and XML transformations, i.e. by running DSSSL or XSLT scripts with a suitable engine, to turn bibliographic data encoded as SGML or XML documents into risx.

Remember that RefDB accepts only four character encodings for XML input data: UTF-8, UTF-16, ISO-8859-1, and US-ASCII. If your input data use a different character encoding, please use the command-line utility iconv (usually part of the libiconv package) to convert your data to one of the existing character encodings. Do not forget to specify the character encoding in the processing instructions of the input file, otherwise RefDB will assume the data are encoded as UTF-8.

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