Research buddy – User manual

 

While browsing a web page, select some text and choose the research buddy option (either from the right click menu, or from the Tools menu). The following dialog will appear.  This dialog can also be opened from the Tools menu, by selecting “Research Buddy”.

 

 

 

• Add citation to an already existing topic
  Select the topic you wish to add a citation to and then press the “Add to Selected” button.

 

• Delete a topic
  Select the topic you wish to remove and press the “Delete topic” button.
  NOTE: All citation information for the selected topic will be deleted from the disk.

 

• Rename a topic
   Select the topic you wish to rename and then press the “Rename topic” button. A new dialog window will pop up and you must enter the new name for the selected topic in this dialog.

 

• View a topic
  Select the topic and press the “View Topic” button. A new window will be opened displaying the citations for the selected topic. The display format can be specified in the Prefrences.

 

 

Preferences

 

To modify the preferences of “Research Buddy”, press the “Preferences” button.

 

• Save Options
• Root Directory
  The root directory is where all the citation formation for each topic is held. You can specify the root directory by pressing the “Browse…” button which will open a directory picker dialog. Select the directory you wish to use and press “OK.” The default root directory is your firefox profile directory.
  NOTE: For each new topic, a folder bearing the name of the topic is created in the root directory. For example, with a root directory of  c:\bibliography creating a topic called French Revolution would create a directory c:\bibliography\French Revolution\. All citations for a given topic are stored in xml format in the topic directory in a file called bibliography.xml.
• NOTE: If you change your root directory, old topics will NOT be copied to the new directory: you must do this yourself. 
• Save entire page HTML
  When this option is selected, Research Buddy will save the HTML of the page you were viewing when you launched Research Buddy. This is stored in a folder bearing the name of the page title.
• Save images
  When this option is selected, the images on the page you were viewing will also be saved.
  Note: This option can only be selected when the Save entire page HTML option is selected.
  
  

 

• Display Options
  Format string.  This allows you to specify how to display bibliography entries.  Characters not in the listing below will be displayed raw: this allows the user to insert HTML tags (use lowercase letters) into the display.

 

Future Work

 

A few things:

1) When the root dir is changed, actually migrate the user’s data…we don’t do this currently.

2) More error checking.  We do a good job, but not everything is caught

3) Create links in the view to go to a) the local stored version of the file, and b) the actual URL