PubMode - A PubMed interface for Emacs

• Features
• Download
• Getting started
• Contact

Features

PubMode is an extension for the widely used text editor Emacs that allows to search and retrieve bibliographic data from the PubMed literature database. It provides a full featured interface that - in the spirit of Emacs - can be efficiently controlled by keyboard commands. Citations can be searched, browsed and imported without the need for a web-browser or any other external program. In particular, PubMode is designed to integrate seamlessly with LaTeX/BibTeX in the process of creating scientific publications.

The current set of features include

• Search PubMed from within Emacs using the same search syntax used on the NCBI web-site.
• Keyboard controlled interface implementing the most important functions known from NCBI:
  • Display articles at various detail levels (e.g. one line citations or full citation+abstract).
  • Distribute results on multiple pages and download them only if needed.
  • Open full text articles in an external browser using the NCBI LinkOut service.
  • Search related articles for a given item.
• Import one or more citations as text to the current document or clip-board.
• Full support for LaTeX/BibTeX
  • Convert PubMed entries to BibTeX in a consistent and correct way.
  • Generate BibTeX keys and add entries to your local database files.
  • Add citation commands to LaTeX documents.

The current version of PubMode is the first one released to the public. It implements a set of basic features that appeared reasonable to me. PubMode has been tested by myself and some of my colleagues. Care has been taken to foresee and handle all peculiar things that can occur in PubMed. However, it is likely that there are still many bugs and things that some people would handle in a different way. So if you find a bug, find things annoying, or have suggestions for additional features, please let me know.

Download

Currently, PubMode only support GNU Emacs 22.x or higher.

Getting started

Download the latest *.tar.gz package and extract it in /some/directory:

cd ~/some/directory
tar -xzf PubMode-0.1.tar.gz

Add the following lines to your Emacs configuration file .emacs

(add-to-list 'load-path "~/some/directory/PubMode-0.1/lisp")
(autoload 'pub-med "pub" "PubMed Interface for Emacs" t)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-c p") 'pub-med)

You can now query PubMed from within Emacs with "C-c p" or "M-x pub-med". Please refer to the files README and INSTALLATION for more information.

Screenshot

The right window shows the results for a PubMed query for "noncoding RNAs". Article six has been imported as BibTeX (lower left window) and cited in a LaTeX document (upper left window).

Contact

Please feel free to contact me for feature requests, comments, bug-reports etc.