I have been working through my references and papers trying to regain some control over the literature. Being reintroduced to the tedium of reference management, it seems like there must be a better way to catalogue and organize this important component of research. Ideally, with the Internet and some good citation support from publishers, I would never have to type a citation – just automagically download whatever I need. Obviously this is not currently available.

I use BibDesk for my reference management and the author has some interesting ideas about sharing reference databases easily among colleagues. In this spirit of sharing, I’’ve decided to make my reference database available here. It is in BibTeX format, which most useful reference management software should recognize. As BibDesk matures I hope to make this database accessible in a more useful format (i.e., automatic synchronization). Until then I will update the publicly available database as often as possible. Ideally the database will become a group effort, maintained and expanded by whoever uses it. If you are interested in participating, let me know. There are some fields in the database that may not be useful. In particular, there is a link to the PDF location on my harddrive. I considered transfering these links and associated files to the Internet as well. However, there are copyright concerns with such a setup that need to be considered.