Some quick half-baked thoughts on citation matching. One of the things I'd really like to add to BioStor is the ability to parse article text and extract the list of literature cited.

Following on from my previous post on BHL apps and a Twitter discussion in which I appealed for a "sexier" interface for BHL (to which @elywreplied that is what BHL Australia were trying to do), here are some further thoughts on improving BHL's web interface. Build a new interface A fun project would be to create a BHL website clone using just the BHL API.

Prompted by the appearance on the BHL blog of an article about BioStor I've thinking about how to improve what is basically a fairly clunky tool.One major weakness is searching the collection of nearly 40,000 articles extracted from BHL. Note the word "extracted." BioStor isn't a tool like PubMed or Google Scholar where the goal is to find articles on a topic.

Last December I released a web site called Australian Faunal Directory on CouchDB, which was part of my ongoing exploration of how to build a simple yet useful database of taxonomic names. In particular, I want to link names directly to the primary taxonomic literature.

My article describing BioStor — "Extracting scientific articles from a large digital archive: BioStor and the Biodiversity Heritage Library" — has finally seen the light of day in BMC Bioinformatics (doi:10.1186/1471-2105-12-187, the DOI is not working at the moment, give it a little while to go live, meantime you can access the article here).Getting this article published was more work than I expected.

One of the many biggest challenges I've faced with the BioStor project, apart from dealing with messy metadata, has been handling page images. At present I get these from the Biodiversity Heritage Library. They are big (typically 1 Mb in size), and have the caramel colour of old paper.

Following on from my previous post on microcitations I've blasted all the citations in Nomenclator Zoologicus through my microcitation service and created a simple web site where these results can be browsed.The web site is here: http://iphylo.org/~rpage/nz/.To create it I've taken a file dump of Nomenclator Zoologicus provided by Dave Remsen and run all the citations through the microcitation service, storing the results in a simple database.

BioStor has had a Twitter account @biostor_org for a while, but it's not been active.

Mendeley has added a feature which makes it easier to use Mendeley with repositories such as BioStor and BHL.

Quick note to express the frustration I experience sometimes when dealing with taxonomic literature.