nlm citation generator

nlm citation generator

Generating NLM Citations

1. Introduction

Typical 11 bd.P.c. here costs between 25 to 75 cents. An additional 50 cents is required for each fiche copy. While the use of the online retrieval system is, in fact, a cost recovery effort (notable) – 6 out-digm access fees ensure that researchers will continue to submit materials for inclusion into the system – the Photoduplication service has a direct impact on NLM’s policy concerning access to the online retrieval system. The argument about methodical literature was that it did not belong in this paper for simple implementations of automated footnoting systems could include medical literature references. This report focuses on the steps required to read the information in the MEDLARS Online database of the NLM and produce citations to it that may be easily incorporated into user papers.

The National Library of Medicine (NLM) provides an online database of medical literature. The database is called MEDLARS Online or MEDLINE for short, and it is freely available to qualified medical researchers. As described in Machlis [1972], the NLM database is analogous to Dialog’s DIALBOX product, also an online retrieval system that allows users to search and retrieve abstracts from a variety of computer research journals. And like M. E. db, the popular IBM Medical Economic-Databank that is also maintained by the NLM, access to MEDLINE is granted in return for a promise to use the database only for medical research. The reason NLM restricts its database to medical researchers is that while most medical publications are restricted, NLM is currently providing an unrestricted dissemination of its database’s content. This is because the database is also used as a day fast by NLM’s Photoduplication Service, a service in which users may request microfiche copies of documents.

2. Benefits of Using NLM Citations

When submitting a manuscript, authors should use the materials provided by the publisher for the preferred style for the journal to which they are submitting. If the style requires a standard format for an article, authors should not use the NLM format. However, the quality and accuracy of the citation data is a common concern for most editors. Therefore, authors seeking to provide high-quality reference lists for their publication or wishing to have a reliable way to build an article repository may be interested in using the NLM style for their references. Particularly where the illustrations and features of CitLM provide authoring efficiencies or where a unique citation algorithm detects nontechnical errors in author-prepared references, authors may find it advantageous to employ the NLM’s citation format before they submit their manuscript to a publisher.

Some benefits of using NLM citations are that they are recognized as a common standard for bibliographic references and that they are consistently and accurately searchable in all NLM systems. Retrieval of citations can be hampered by inaccuracies or outdated data in the citation, such as a misspelled journal title or an abbreviated pagination. By using NLM citations, these problems are eliminated. Consistency in article titles is also important because retrieval of MEDLINE data is not case-sensitive for the English language, and the titles of MEDLINE citations are maintained with the same case that the author used.

3. How to Use the NLM Citation Generator

The final piece of code for every format will consist of a list with the contemplated tags. Each element in the list will be a dictionary with several key-value pairs — contemplate how to deal with the content if blank, for instance, to include an author if the citation format is for a publication or to just introduce “n.d.” if it is a keyword —, what converters to apply, and different types of actions to perform in different groups of HTML code. More specific instructions can be found in the package source.

3.2 Customization of Formats. Of course, a variety of formats may be generated, but the main novelty of our program is the possibility to define completely arbitrary ones given a syntax that easily maps to LaTeX. In order to help in creating such formats, we remind the user of the default formats. We consider the format is divided into sections that must specify what and how one wants to do with different fields (Citation or Keyword) and tags (Title, Abstract, and Number).

3.1 Input Data. After having extracted the PAS to be described, several LaTeX files (one per figure/plot) and a tabular LaTeX document of the content of the PAS have been obtained, the user prepares the input data for the NLM Citation Generator. This corresponds to looking for different texts, such as figures for citations, the content of tables or certain terms/names for keywords, and introducing them in a Python dictionary. While some items may be identified through default values, it is up to the user to adhere to this list of key-value pairs.

4. Tips for Accurate NLM Citations

In the text of the article, write the calls following the NLM instructions (author1 et al, date), without the hyperlink. Put your software to format the citations (such as Endnote, for example), with the following characteristics: “author1 et al. (date)” and the citation’s information in the footnotes (it should be in the NLM style), at the bottom of each page. Do not use numbering for the citations. Such a style of formatting is also very useful to help you revise reference organization, especially if you receive the reviewers’ suggestions for changes. Some scientists prefer to receive the manuscript formatted in this way with the citations’ information at the bottom of each page. Then, you only have to copy and paste the footnotes at the end of your manuscript in the specific space destined for the references.

What does not work. Do not use Endnote Software, the software available in local institutions to insert citations in the text. This software does not insert the hyperlink in the citations, which is fundamental for the accession to the articles during the review. If you have used it and the NLM citation is not appearing, you must write the citation again, manually. Sometimes, during the publication for the open access, for example, SciElo inserts the hyperlink in the citations. However, do not count on this, because you are responsible for the citation quality in your article.

5. Conclusion

Thus, the development efforts for the implementation presented here are, in the best case, effort-neutral if the NLM BibLaTeX style is used more than once or if NLM citations are to be printed multiple times in the final document because time is saved due to the automated citation generation. However, the development costs are significant if no plans for re-use of the implementation exist. Then, the effort can only be justified with a high number of NLM-formatted citations such that no formatting or typesetting changes have to be applied manually. The practicality of the NLM BibLaTeX style is beyond debate for LaTeX-based documents. However, it cannot be used to facilitate manual typing in Word, WYSIWYG editors, or, despite their rising popularity, Overleaf and ShareLaTeX.

In this paper, we developed several NLM-type styles, implemented them using the NLM BibLaTeX style, and showed how to apply them to the use cases of the Bibliometrics Support Service. The NLM BibLaTeX style is the most flexible, customizable, and powerful tool to format biomedical citations using LaTeX. However, it requires detailed knowledge about the formatting standards of NLM journal styles, the BibLaTeX package, and its data model, and programming in the high-level typesetting language LaTeX.