KBibtex in Ubuntu Oneiric 11.10

KBibtex is a useful bibtex bibliography management tool for the KDE desktop.
However, it seems that the package is missing in the Ubuntu 11.10 repositories.

A quick remedy (as tweeted here) is to install the package from the Debian Sid distribution: kbibtex.
To install on the command line (check the exact name of the .deb file)
sudo dpkg -i kbibtex_0.4-1_amd64.deb

Alternatively .deb packages can be installed in the GUI (e.g. by opening the file in Dolphin).

The package should be compatible with Ubuntu 11.10, and seems to work fine.

The 0.4 version has improved a lot and has a very useful online search tool for acquiring bibtex files. Google scholar and other data bases can be used.
Other tools include a reference preview (though bibtex2html) and a PDF preview.

Script for downloading bibtex file using DOI

Digital Object Identifier (DOI) and bibtex files are common for anyone citing scientific articles. The DOI is used to uniquely identify any object, such as an electronic document, while bibtex is used to cite an article in Latex environment.

An article can be found on the internet via the address dx.doi.org/ followed by the DOI, e.g. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ocemod.2004.08.002. However, it takes a while to browse the publishers website, locate the appropriate bibtex file and save it to disk.

Here is a very handy Python script that fetches a bibtex file from NASA’s Astrophysics Data System using the article’s DOI.

It requires Python Beautiful Soup XML/HTML parser.
In Ubuntu-like linux distributions it can be installed easily:
sudo apt-get install python-beautifulsoup

Example:

>>doi2bibtex.py 10.1016/j.ocemod.2004.08.002
@ARTICLE{2005OcMod...9..347S,
author = {{Shchepetkin}, A.~F. and {McWilliams}, J.~C.},
title = "{The regional oceanic modeling system (ROMS): a split-explicit, free-surface, topography-following-coordinate oceanic model}",
journal = {Ocean Modelling},
year = 2005,
volume = 9,
pages = {347-404},
doi = {10.1016/j.ocemod.2004.08.002},
adsurl = {http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2005OcMod...9..347S},
adsnote = {Provided by the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System}
}