PDF or ODF?

 

Some information taken from http://www.academicproductivity.com/blog/2007/on-metadata-indexing-and-mucking-around-with-pdfs/

 

OASIS OpenDocument Format (ODF) could be the solution for this. It seems that word processors are slowly taking  an interest in reference management. Word 2007 features a reference manager, although it is really primitive and not usable for serious academic use. OpenOffice has been behind ODF for a while. if ODF becomes a de-facto standard, we may not need to rely on PDF. And ODF is XML, so adding different fields that can be mined by reference managers shouldn’t be hard. ODF is overseen by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS). That way, the metadata is no longer an extension of the document: the entire document could be parsed and each component could contribute in its indexing. This would make easy to do what citeSeer is trying to do ‘the hard way’ (parsing author, title, etc out of the papers that we academic have in our homepages, and making them available and searchable). 

The need is there. I think the company/University dept. that gets this right will have a winner. For example, the Zotero forums express this need as follows:

(post by CuriousGeorge) Here is what I would like to do ideally:
1. Begin literature review on new topic using databases like JSTOR, Proquest, and Web of Science.
2. Use Zotero’s current “folder” icon in address bar to select articles of interest.
3. Zotero downloads citation information (this already works well), abstract (this often works), and the associated PDF file (with this option enabled in Zotero preferences, it currently works well in JSTOR but not other databases like Proquest).
4. Zotero stores all PDFs in one folder and automatically renames the PDFs based on the associated citation information in the format “Author, Year, Article Title.pdf” (or customized format selected by user).
5. PDFs are read in the browser window and notes are taken in the associated Zotero entry.
6. Zotero allows search in any combination of citation information, abstract/notes, and full text of website/PDF snapshots (stored locally).
7. Lit Review is built by creating new notes that synthesize various articles (these notes take advantage of the “related” option in Zotero to link back to the associated references).
8. The lit review notes and “related” citations are exported to a word processor.
9. The word processor is dynamically linked to the Zotero database for adding new citations and for searching the Zotero database for quotes/notes.