It’s possible (though fiddly) to export a batch of references from a reference management software package, and import them as a batch into a University of Lincoln reading list.
The two reference management packages I use the most are RefWorks and Mendeley, though it should be possible to do this from any reference software that can export .RIS files – i.e. most of them.
From RefWorks:
- Log in to your RefWorks account.
- Add the references you want to export to a single folder.
- Go to the “References” menu and select “Export”.
- In the “Export References” window which appears, choose the folder that contains the references you want to export, and from “Export Format”, select “Bibliographic Software (EndNote,Reference Manager,ProCite)“. Then hit “Export”.
- Look in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen for the “Completed” window, and hit the “click here” link for a file or download prompt.
- The .RIS file should appear in a new window. Don’t try and save the page as a .RIS file, because it includes HTML markup which will cause the reading lists software to reject the file. Instead, copy and paste the contents of the window into a text file (I use Notepad++ on Windows, and gedit on Ubuntu), and save that file as <something>.ris (i.e. give it a “.ris” file extension, not “.txt”).
- Now you can import the saved .RIS file into the reading lists software – see below.
From Mendeley:
- Launch the Mendeley desktop software. (You can’t do the below operation from Mendeley on the web.)
- In a “Documents” view, select/highlight the references you want to export.
- Then go to the “File” menu and select “Export”.
- Change the file type to “RIS – Research Information Systems (*.ris)“, and save the file to your computer.
- Next you will probably need to make a slight edit to the Mendeley .RIS file you have saved on your computer. The University of Lincoln’s reading lists software (Talis Aspire) is very strict and expects the correct newline characters at the end of each line of text in the RIS file. Open the saved .RIS file in your advanced text editor (e.g. Notepad++; gedit), and perform a ‘find and replace’ operation for the following special characters – replace every ‘Line Feed’ character (LF, \n, 0x0A) with ‘Carriage Return’ + ’Line Feed’ (CR+LF, \n\r, 0x0D0A) – then re-save the .RIS file.
- Now you can import the saved .RIS file into the reading lists software – see below.
Importing the saved file:
- Log in to the University of Lincoln reading lists, and go to “My Bookmarks”.
- Mouse over the “Add Bookmark” button and click on “Import Citations”.
- In the “Import resources” window, choose the saved .RIS file from your computer, and hit “Import”. (At this point, you can also choose to add the imported references to a new list if you want – this is optional.)
- The reading lists software will confirm that the .RIS file has been successfully submitted, and you should receive an email when it has been processed and the references are ‘live’ in your account.
Some potential problems:
- The reading lists software is very fussy about following the .RIS file specification in regards to line end / newline characters (see above). If you see the following error message, it is probably caused by the wrong newline characters existing in the .RIS file:
- “This file could not be read. Please check the contents and try again.“
- The references in the reading lists software will only be as good as the ‘source’ references in your reference management software (which in turn are only as good as the place you bookmarked/imported them from in the first place). There’s no guarantee that your .RIS file will contain enough information to construct a full or meaningful reading list item.
- Book references will not be linked automatically to the University of Lincoln library catalogue. To link a book to the catalogue, you will need to find out its bibliographic record number (bib#) and manually add it to a “Local Control Number” field in the reading list item record.
