Citations Helper RIS Testing

Owned by Former user (Deleted)
Last updated: Nov 02, 2011Version comment
2 min read

The Citations Helper tool in Sakai CLE provides, among other things, the capability of importing and exporting citation lists in RIS format. Problems arise because not all citation management tools map fields to RIS in the same way. The goal of this testing is to improve the ability of the Sakai Citations Helper to properly understand and create RIS files.

Testing, documenting problems, and fixing problems (where possible) will be a community effort.

These pages are organized by tool. If you would like to help document and test tools not yet listed, feel free to add them below. Links to product/vendor pages should be put on each product's page.

  • Importing RIS from Endnote into Sakai
  • Importing RIS from Mendeley into Sakai
  • Importing RIS from Reference Manager into Sakai
  • Importing RIS from Refworks into Sakai
  • Importing RIS from Zotero into Sakai

And we should also test

Testing

Initially, we could try testing with a basic citation of each type (see list below). A basic RIS test file is attached to this web page, that contains a citation of each type except "unknown", constructed following the RIS specifications referenced above. 

  1. Download the attached basic test file and import it into the tool you are testing.
  2. Make any necessary corrections in the tool.
  3. Do an RIS export.
  4. Using Sakai, add a citation list via RIS import of the file you just exported.
  5. Evaluate the result, documenting any problems.

Subsequently, a more advanced test would be to take an extensive, real-world bibliography created in the chosen tool, exporting it as RIS, and then importing it into Sakai.

Types of Materials

Citations Helper knows about the following types of materials:

  • Journal Article (JOUR)
  • Book (BOOK)
  • Book Section (CHAP)
  • Electronic Citation (ELEC)
  • Conference Proceeding (CONF; note: probably should be changed to CPAPER (conference paper) instead!)
  • Report (RPRT)
  • Thesis (THES)
  • Unknown (Sakai tags these as type JOUR)

The RIS specification knows about many more types.

In theory, importing well-formed citations into Sakai and then exporting them should not lead to any loss of information. Unrecognized types should still import properly, as "Unknown", and export properly.