NAME
    isi2bibtex - convert ISI database files to BibTeX format

SYNOPSIS
    isi2bibtex [OPTIONS] inputfile [outputfile]

    If no output file is specified, inputfile.bib is used.

    Records are appended if the output file exists.

DESCRIPTION
    Isi2bibtex converts an ISI (Institute for Scientific
    Information) bibliographic database file to a BibTeX file for
    use in TeX and LaTeX documents. Both formats hold bibliographic
    data on scientific and other academic documents.

    (In the UK, the ISI databases are commonly known as 'BIDS' or
    'MIMAS WoS')

    Another way to do the same job isi2bibtex does is with bp, which
    has the advantage of converting between many different
    bibliographic formats and character sets. If you don't want
    that, isi2bibtex understands BIDS standard format in addition to
    the others, and is stand-alone and so presumably easier to get
    working.

  Options

    -h, --help display help and exit

    -v, --version display version information and exit

    -q, --quiet no informational output

    -a, --abstract include abstract in output file

    -c, --check make some checks on field contents (default)

    -n, --nocheck don't make checks on field contents

  Input databases

    Although isi2bibtex was written for SCI (Science Citation
    Index), all the ISI databases should work (SCI, SSCI, A&HCI,
    ISTP). Isi2bibtex will probably make a bad job of editing the
    content of these other databases, and would have to be changed a
    bit (not difficult), but you may be lucky.

    In the UK, probably most of the other databases on BIDS should
    work either straight away or with a small amount of modification
    of the script. BIDS Pascal for instance works with downloading
    format, and would work with a small amount of modification with
    standard format.

  Input formats

    If you use a web interface to ISI, isi2bibtex will only convert
    text output (whether emailed or saved directly), not saved web
    pages or other bibliography formats such as Procite or Reference
    Manager. Specifically, the formats that are understood are:

    ISI generic output format version 1.0:

    I presume this is the format used in most of the world. In the
    UK, this is output by MIMAS WoS 'save records' or 'email
    records'.

    BIDS standard format:

    (any of: Title only; Title, authors & journal; Full record
    excluding citations; Full record)

    BIDS downloading format:

    (any of: Title, authors & journal in downloading format; Full
    record in downloading format)

    You can mix and match record formats in one file. Deleting
    fields and / or record numbers from records should be okay. Any
    fields may be present in any order. Don't change the indentation
    of records: isi2bibtex will ignore records if they're too
    different from the usual layout due to ambiguity of field labels
    and field contents.

  Output fields

    For ISI generic format (eg MIMAS WoS output) and BIDS
    downloading format, fields other than title (TI), author (AU),
    source ie journal (SO), page range (BP, EP), year (PY) and
    abstract (AB) are ignored.

    For standard BIDS format, fields other than Title (TI:), author
    (AU:), journal (JN:) and abstract (AB:) are ignored (the JN:
    field contains the page numbers, volume, date, etc as well as
    the journal name).

    At the moment isi2bibtex only outputs the more useful fields,
    but this may change in the future (when someone gets round to
    it). Which fields are output can be controlled with a
    configuration file (see below). Those that don't correspond to
    the standard BibTeX fields (such as abstract) won't be
    recognised by BibTeX by default, but they'll be there if you
    need to use them.

  Output formatting

    Output is tidied up as much as possible, but some editing is
    still required.

    Output formatting defaults can be modified with a configuration
    file. /etc/isi2bibtexrc and ~/.isi2bibtexrc (or whatever you set
    in the @CONFIG variable in the script) are looked at in that
    order for configuration settings, with the latter overriding the
    former. See the example configuration file provided.

    If they are switched on, things like journal title abbreviations
    and acronym capitalisations can be added and removed at the end
    of the script (very easy to do by looking at what's there
    already). Newer ISI entries have lower case as well as upper,
    and isi2bibtex always leaves the capitalization as-is for those
    records.

DOESN'T WORK?
    Remember to:

  Unix

    set the first line of this script to point to your copy of perl
    (eg. /usr/bin/perl or /usr/local/bin/perl)

    make it executable (eg. chmod +x ./isi2bibtex)

    put it somewhere your OS can find it (eg ~/bin or
    /usr/local/bin): you may need to change your PATH environment
    variable

  Microsoft Windows

    change the name of this script to isi2bibtex.pl (you'll have to
    use it as

    isi2bibtex.pl [OPTIONS] inputfile.txt outputfile.bib

    rather than

    isi2bibtex [OPTIONS] inputfile.txt outputfile.bib

    because the windows DOS shell doesn't know about the #! line)

    put it in your Perl bin directory, eg C:\Perl\bin (obviously if
    you don't have perl installed, you need to do that first: see
    below)

    if that doesn't work check the PATH environment variable
    contains your perl bin directory, and as a last resort try

        perl C:\Perl\bin\isi2bibtex.pl inputfile.txt

  Other platforms

    I have no idea, but it should work on any platform that runs
    Perl 5, perhaps with a few small modifications. Isi2bibtex has
    been tested on Windows (95 and NT) and Unix. Please send me any
    portability changes.

    Email <jjl@pobox.com> if it still doesn't work.

KNOWN PROBLEMS
    It only does articles, not books, proceedings etc, and won't
    notice if a record isn't an article.

    It ignores some fields (mostly those that don't correspond to
    the standard BibTeX 'article' fields).

    ISI access providers' output other than BIDS and MIMAS WOS
    haven't been tested. Send me an output file and I'll make it
    work with that format (for SCI).

    Please tell me about any bugs you find, at
    <jjl@pobox.com>.

SEE ALSO
    If you don't have Perl installed, it can be got (free) from
    http://www.perl.com/ . LaTeX, BibTeX and everything else TeX can
    be downloaded from http://www.CTAN.org/ .

    bp converts between many bibliography database formats
    (including conversion from BIDS downloading and ISI generic
    formats to BibTeX), and many character sets.

    Ben Bolker (author of the BIDS / MIMAS WOS specification for bp)
    has a page describing his modifications to bp:

    http://www.zoo.ufl.edu/bolker/bp.html

    Dana Jacobsen (author of bp) has a web page with lots of
    bibliography software information and details of his bp package:

    http://www.ecst.csuchico.edu/~jacobsd/bib/index.html

    Some other BibTeX utilities that may or may not be useful (these
    are just the ones I've got round to looking at):

    bibclean checks and formats BibTeX databases

    bibsort sorts BibTeX databases

    bib2dvi converts BibTeX databases to DVI files (DVI files are
    output by LaTeX and are DeVice Independent typeset documents, a
    bit like postscript or pdf -- you can read them on most computer
    systems)

    bibextract, citefind and citetags respectively extract BibTeX
    records from a BibTeX database, extract LaTeX references from a
    LaTeX document, and look up LaTeX references in a BibTeX
    database.

    bibindex makes an index for fast lookup by biblook, if you have
    a huge database that needs it I suppose

    BibTool is an all-singing all-dancing general purpose BibTeX
    management utility

    bibview is a simple interactive searching utility for BibTeX
    files

    findbib gets BibTeX records corresponding to references in a
    LaTeX file from a preprint server (don't know if it still works)

    both refer2bibtex and r2bib convert refer files (whatever they
    are) to BibTeX files

    tkbibtex is a graphical tool for editing and searching BibTeX
    databases

    Text::BibTeX is a Perl module for doing things to BibTeX
    databases.

COPYRIGHT
    Copyright (C) 2000 Jonathan Swinton, Ben Bolker, Anthony Stone,
    John J. Lee

    Isi2bibtex replaces and is derived from bids.to.bibtex (as of 29
    Jan 1998) and isi2bib 0.1.

    bids.to.bibtex was based on a perl script written by Jonathan
    Swinton, and subsequently modified by Ben Bolker and Anthony
    Stone.

    isi2bib 0.1 was written by John J. Lee <jjl@pobox.com>

    This script is covered by the GPL. See the script for copyright
    information.

FILES
    /etc/isi2bibtexrc, ~/.isi2bibtexrc (or whatever you set in the
    @CONFIG variable) are looked at in that order for default
    configuration settings, with the latter overriding the former.
    See the example configuration file provided.

VERSION
    0.40

