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Completed

Label the "paper" link something more general / accurate

Adam Rego Johnson 2 years ago updated 2 years ago 11

The URL field is always displayed as a hyperlink labelled "paper", which comes across as confusing, to me, when viewing a reference for say, a book or book chapter, or anything else (e.g., something that would go in the "misc" item type, such as legal documents or tax forms, of which I have many in one of my libraries).


This also often confuses others browsing my library because there is also "link" when browsing the library page itself, which is a link to a separate BibBase page for that reference, and it's not clear that "paper" is the url field while "link" is not.


Is there a better, more general, term to label this hyperlink? There are three options I see:

1) "URL"

2) "link" -- I think this is the most intuitive label, but this would require changing the current "link" to something else to differentiate it. Perhaps you could change the current "link" to be labelled as "reference link", or "link to reference", or "BibBase link", or "citation link"? I'm not sure. I think "BibBase link" (or "bibbase link" to go with the rest of the lowercasing) is the clearest, but these are all the examples I could think of that may be clear.

3) "URL" but also change the current "link" label as described in (2) to make the difference between "link" and "URL" more intuitive, as these still would sound similar.

Thank you for all your work on BibBase!

Under review

Hi Adam,

Have a look at https://bibbase.org/help#howdoiaddlinkstomypaperspdfsetc, it describes how you can change 'paper' to anything else you want it to be by adding a suffix to the url field, e.g.:

    url_Slides =   {talks/gau-hum-1830.ppt}

Hi Christian,

I am aware of this option, I use it for other purposes, but I wouldn't change the base URL field in my references to something like "url_url = {}" because this would require my users who are downloading / copying the BibTeX to manually change all the URL fields to have them print in their citations.


I include "url_file = {title.pdf}" in my references as this is a field any TeX engine would ignore in creating the citation, and it is not something the user would want printed anyway (it is not a real link, only working on BibBase, which is fine), whereas the regular url field is something they may often want and is integral to the reference.


The user experience is particularly important to me in this case because the BibBase page is being used for a large public-facing database of existing research, so we want it to be as easy as possible for other researchers to download or copy the Bib information and use it in their own work (which BibBase does a good job at!).

Hi Adam,

I see your point, and we've just added a new option urlLabel that you can use as a parameter in the bibbase url to overwrite "Paper" with any other string you think works better in your context, e.g., &urlLabel=URL. Please try it out and let me know if that solves your problem.

Thanks!

Hi Christian,

This works well, thank you. Is there any way to have this option accepted for the direct publication links? E.g., https://bibbase.org/network/publication/kennickell-lindner-schrz-anewinstrumenttomeasurewealthinequalitydistributionalwealthaccounts-2022&urlLabel=url.


Appending it to one of those links currently results in a 404, as in the example above, so I assume these links do not currently take any additional parameters. It would be nice to have the direct publication links consistent with our publication list. We link directly to relevant references through their BibBase publication links when we use them as a data source for our research, but this is then of course (currently) a page out of our control (regarding formatting/styling) in comparison to the full publication lists we embed elsewhere in our site, which can be tweaked through URL parameters and CSS.

I figured we could perhaps adjust the paper link on our publication list through some CSS, but knew that this wouldn't affect the direct links, which are a concern for us as well, which is why I posted suggesting an overall change. If you don't want to implement the suggestions as the default that is of course fine, but then perhaps there could be an option for these links as well? And if those links were to accept the url parameter, then I assume if you appended &urlLabel=url to the publication list url it could append that same parameter to the direct publication links generated in that publication list for each reference.

Thank you,

Adam

Hi Adam,

This is now possible. If you add the "&urlLabel=URL" option to the page where you are using bibbase it will update the labels now also in our DB used for rendering the separate pages you mentioned, e.g.:
https://bibbase.org/network/publication/kennickell-lindner-schrz-anewinstrumenttomeasurewealthinequalitydistributionalwealthaccounts-2022

Note that you will need to add the "&urlLabel=URL" option to all places where you embed bibbase in your own pages since the last-rendered such page will set the label used in the database.


Christian

+1

Hi Christian,

This is wonderful, and seems to work perfectly. Thank you so much! I very much appreciate you taking the time to do this, this is perfect for our needs.

Adam

Hi Christian,

Sorry, but quick question:

Is it intentional that the first character of the url label is always capitalized?


I've noticed that other custom links, made through adding "url_slides" etc. to the bib file, will always come out with the first character capitalized in their hyperlinks on BibBase, and was thinking about making a post some time next week asking if this could or should be changed to match the rest of the stylistic lowercasing on BibBase, but I figured this might also actually be a question relevant here (as I noticed the same capitalization of the first character happens to the url label, e.g., when inputting urlLabel=url, this now looks stylistically consistent in the publication lists as "url", but is still transformed to "Url" in the separate pages, which looks a bit odd to me). Sorry if this is too nit picky, but I figured I'd mention it.

Thank you.

Completed

Hi Adam,

Users can actually customize that by adding CSS to their page, e.g.

span.bibbase_icon_text {
  text-transform: lowercase;
}

will do what you want.

I see, thank you. Would that carry over to the separate publication pages in this case with the URL label though, stopping it from transforming to "Url" there?

ah, no, you are right. It wouldn't. Let me think about that one.

Any updates on this? Thank you.