Table 1.
Feature comparison
| Management of personal collections | Full-text search | Bibliography-PDF match automated | Personal annotations | Shared collections | Approximate search patterns | Search with synonyms | Index browsing | Ease of I/O with external tools10 | Free use or open-source | Requirements | |
| BibGlimpse | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No | Yes/Yes | Yes11 | Bash, Perl, Apache |
| Abstracting services | |||||||||||
| PubMed | Prt1 | No | Prt3 | No | No | No | Prt | Yes | No/Yes | Yes | Web |
| ISI Web of | Prt1 | No | No | No | No | No | No | Yes | No/Yes | No | Web |
| Science Search engine | |||||||||||
| Google Scholar | No | Yes2 | Prt3 | No | No | No | No | No | No/No | Yes | Web |
| Reference managers | |||||||||||
| EndNote | Yes | No | No4 | Yes | No | No | No | Prt | No/Yes | No | Win/Mac |
| RefBase | Yes | No | No | Yes | Yes | No | No | Yes9 | No/Yes | Yes | XAMPP12 |
| iPapers | Yes | Yes | No5 | Yes | No | No | No | No | No/Yes | Yes | Mac |
| Social bookmarking | |||||||||||
| CiteULike | Yes | No | No6 | Prt7 | Yes | No | No | Tags | No/Prt | Yes | Web |
| Connotea | Yes | No | No6 | Yes | Yes | No | No | Tags | No/Prt | Yes | Web |
| Digital library | |||||||||||
| Greenstone | Yes | Yes | No | Yes8 | Yes8 | Yes | No | Yes | Yes/Yes | Yes | Perl, Apache |
Feature comparison between BibGlimpse and other bibliographic software tools. 'Prt' indicates that a feature is partly supported. 1 Searches and selected references can be stored in collections. 2 Covers the first 120 kB of open access papers and a non-disclosed list of publishers; all recent articles by Elsevier publications are, e.g., excluded. PubMed is indexed with a lagtime of up to a year. 3 Linking bibliography to full text; not the other way around. 4 For a given reference an automated online search for the corresponding full-text can be performed. 5 Requires file named PMID.pdf, where PMID is the PubMed ID, to download bibliography from PubMed. 6 Needs link to website, not link to PDF. Retrieval is not generic, but publisher site tailored. 7 Notes are not searchable. 8 Greenstone is a tool to build digital libraries, so library needs to be designed first. 9 MySQL database can be queried directly by passing MySQL search strings. 10 Input means that results of external tools can easily be input into the system for subsequent integrated analysis and searches. Output means that data in the system can be output to external tools. 11 Code free for non-profit and academic use. 12 Package providing PHP, MySQL and Apache for different platforms.