This section walks you through all the screens which are directly available through the links on the left hand side of the search pages.
If you first access the refdb web interface, you'll see a form with three main parts:
An authentication part: Please enter your refdb username and password. If you already know the database that you want to access, enter its name as well. The Login button is provided in case you want immediately switch to a different page. You don't have to press this button if you want to run a query from the same page. Pressing one of the Send Query buttons will do the login for you on the fly.
A simple query part: This works like many database interfaces that you may already know. You can search for up to four search terms in either authornames, keywords, or journals, and connect these terms with boolean operators.
An advanced query part: This accepts a query string like the refdbc command line client expects in the getref command.
For both query types you can select the scope of your query. This determines whether all matching references will be displayed or only those that are in your personal reference list. By clicking on the corresponding checkboxes you can also specify additional fields that should be displayed in the output in addition to the default fields. To run your query, press the Send Query button.
If you visit this query form later from a different page, the authentication part will be missing: Your authentication data will be reused for at least your current browser session. It is at the discretion of your site administrator to set the life span of the cookies that hold the login information.
If your query is successful, you will be rewarded with a list of matching references. At the top of the list you will find three buttons: Delete selected references, Add selected references to Personal List, and Remove selected references from Personal List. These buttons act on the references that you specifically select.
To this end, each entry in the list has a checkbox. Click the box and the corresponding reference is selected. Click it again to deselect it.
Right next to this checkbox there is an Edit button. This allows you to edit the corresponding reference. refdb will provide the reference in the RIS format. Make any changes that are necessary, but do not alter or remove the line containing the ID tag. This information is necessary to update the dataset in the database. Do not split the information of one tag into several lines. When you're done with your changes, press the Update button to submit the changes.
The title almost says it all. Enter a Unix-style regular expression, select either keywords, authors, or journals from the drop-down box, and click the send button.
refdb provides an empty text field where you can either type or paste a reference. Use the radio button above the text field to select the reference format.
| Warning |
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Some browsers (including recent Mozilla versions) have the nasty habit to fold consecutive spaces when you copy them from text fields. So be careful when you try to copy an existing reference into the Add references page to modify it. All tags must have the two-letter identifier, followed by two spaces, a dash, and another space. |
Press the Add button when you're done to submit the new reference. In the case of RIS data, a page will pop up and display the result of the command. In the case of BibTeX or Pubmed data, another "Add references" page will be displayed with the converted reference in RIS format. You can edit the converted reference as necessary and then add it to the database by pressing the Add button.
Use this page to switch to a different database or to select a useful database in the first place. To see a list of available databases, provide a SQL regular expression to narrow the list of matches. If you want to see all available databases, simply enter "%". Press the Send query button to retrieve the list of matching databases.
refdb returns a list of available MySQL databases. Depending on how MySQL is used on your site, this may not all be refdb databases. Select one database by clicking on the radio button to the left of the entry. Then press the Select database button to make this selection permanent.
The sole purpose of this page is to remove the cookies with your access information from the computer's hard drive. This makes the whole business a tad more secure if you share the computer with other users.
On the other hand, if you do not have security concerns and like the convenience to access your references at a later time without logging in, you want to avoid this page altogether. In this case, the cookies will expire at the time preset by your site administrator.