RefSense 0.5 review

RefSense is the name of both a web interface to PubMed, and a set of command line tools for accessing PubMed

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 29K Developer: Lars Arvestad

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RefSense is the name of both a web interface to PubMed, and a set of command line tools for accessing PubMed. RefSense was previously distributed as Biblio.

The web interface provides easy access to PubMed's data as well as some useful tools not found at the actual PubMed site.

The command line tools allow you to search PubMed from a terminal (such as xterm), retrieve web pages or PDFs, find related articles, convert to BibTeX, and much more by only using a keyboard. And you can get convenient word completion on titles, author names, etc, as well!

Usage:

The following commands are available:

pmsearch
Search Medline and have article identifiers (PMID) returned.

pmid2text
Take PMIDs (on the command line or from STDIN) and retrieve the entries as text in a couple of formats, including partial HTML for building web pages with.

pmid2bibtex
Works like pmid2text, but writes BibTeX records to STDOUT.

pubmed
This is a simple script that essentially executes pmsearch search terms | pmid2text -a.

pmid2seq
Download sequences from PubMed that are refereced, linked, to an article.

pmid2related
Retrieve a list of articles related to your input PMIDs.

pmcomplete
Interface RefSense commands with the completion system in Bash.