Automatically link bibliography entry to Google Scholar when no url field is present

Question

Something I thought would be absolutely amazing but is way beyond my BibLaTeX skills: whenever there is no url field, generate a link that searches for the title, authors and year on Google Scholar. So for a paper named "Rocket Science", written by J. Doe in 1999 the link http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22Rocket+Science%22+author%3Adoe&as_ylo=1999&as_yhi=1999 would be generated and put on the paper name of the bibliography entry or where ever it would be convenient.

I think exact title, year and author should be almost always unambiguous and available. This is how the cryptic query above would look when entered:

So if somebody liked the idea and had the biblatex-fu to implement it, I'd be totally jazzed :)

Answer 1

Here is a a solution which requires biblatex 2.3 and biber 1.3 (both in DEV on SF). Firstly, let's allow a new "AUTOURL" field in all entries so we can populate this as we probably don't want to use the URL field as it can be printed in the bibliography. We can change our driver to test for the AUTOURL field and to add a hyperlink on the title or whatever. Here I'm concentrating just on generating the url data for this.

Add this to your biblatex-dm.cfg

\DeclareDatamodelEntryfields{autourl}
\DeclareDatamodelFields[type=field, datatype=uri]{autourl}

Now we do the real work with the biber sourcemap feature which is better than hard-coding all this as we can then create arbitrary URLs:

\DeclareSourcemap{
  \maps[datatype=bibtex]{
     \map[overwrite]{
      \step[fieldset=autourl, fieldvalue={http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q="}]
      \step[fieldsource=title]
      \step[fieldset=autourl, origfieldval, append]
      \step[fieldset=autourl, fieldvalue={"+author:}, append]
      \step[fieldsource=author, match=\regexp{\A([^,]+)\s*,}]
      \step[fieldset=autourl, fieldvalue={$1}, append]
      \step[fieldset=autourl, fieldvalue={&as_ylo=}, append]
      \step[fieldsource=year]
      \step[fieldset=autourl, origfieldval, append]
      \step[fieldset=autourl, fieldvalue={&as_yhi=}, append]
      \step[fieldset=autourl, origfieldval, append]
    }
  }
}

Biber will also URL escape any UTF-8 or LaTeX char macros which end up in the URL due to splicing in parts of other fields so you don't have to worry about that.

This results in a field in the .bbl like this:

Which you can reference as the "AUTOURL" field in some logic such as the TITLE field format to add it as a hyperref link. To take a simple example:

\DeclareFieldFormat{title}{\href{\thefield{autourl}}{#1}}

Here is a more sophisticated example that works for all entry types in their default configuration without changing it and uses the auto-generated URL only when no custom one is available:

\DeclareFieldFormat{title}{\iffieldundef{url}{\href{\thefield{autourl}}{\mkbibemph{#1}}}{\href{\thefield{url}}{\mkbibemph{#1}}}}
\DeclareFieldFormat[article,inbook,incollection,inproceedings,patent,thesis,unpublished]{title}{\iffieldundef{url}{\href{\thefield{autourl}}{\mkbibquote{#1\isdot}}}{\href{\thefield{url}}{\mkbibquote{#1\isdot}}}}
\DeclareFieldFormat[suppbook,suppcollection,suppperiodical]{title}{\iffieldundef{url}{\href{\thefield{autourl}}{#1}}{\href{\thefield{url}}{#1}}}

Only the url field is used to replace autourl, not URLs generated from doi or eprint. A production version should also respect \ifhyperref and should be made more robust against missing fields.

Answer 2

Second version

Most of the work can be done using biblatex if we assume that the only tricky characters are spaces. To do the conversion, I've used a special name format which simply saves surnames to a temporary variable using + to separate them. The title is surrounded by \%22 (encoded ""), and the first and last years are set to be the same value (there is no check on the validity of the year).

\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@article{test,
  author = {Doe, J. and Other, Arthur N.},
  title  = {Rocket Science},
  year   = {1999},
}
\end{filecontents}
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{expl3}
\usepackage[backend=bibtex]{biblatex}
\bibliography{\jobname}

\ExplSyntaxOn
\char_set_catcode_space:N \ %
\cs_new_protected:Npn\spacetoplus#1%
  {\tl_greplace_all:Nnn#1{ }{+}}
\ExplSyntaxOff
\makeatletter
\DeclareNameFormat{searchurl}{%
  \ifnumequal{\value{listcount}}{1}
    {}
    {\gappto{\bbx@gtempa}{+}}%
  \xdef\bbx@gtempa{%
    \unexpanded\expandafter{\bbx@gtempa}%
    author\@percentchar 3A%
    \unexpanded{#1}%
  }%
}

\newbibmacro*{url+urldate}{%
  \iffieldundef{url}
    {%
      \savefield{title}{\bbx@gtempa}%
      \xdef\bbx@gtempa{%
        http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=
        \@percentchar
        22%
        \unexpanded\expandafter{\bbx@gtempa}%
      }
      \xdef\bbx@gtempa{%
        \unexpanded\expandafter{\bbx@gtempa}%
        \@percentchar 22+%
      }
      \printnames[searchurl]{author}%
      \edef\bbx@tempa{&as_ylo=\thefield{year}&as_yhi=\thefield{year}}%
      \xdef\bbx@gtempa{%
        \unexpanded\expandafter{\bbx@gtempa}%
        \unexpanded\expandafter{\bbx@tempa}%
      }%
      \spacetoplus{\bbx@gtempa}%
      \restorefield{url}{\bbx@gtempa}%
    }
    {}%
  \printfield{url}%
  \iffieldundef{urlyear}
    {}
    {\setunit*{\addspace}%
     \printurldate}}
\makeatother
\begin{document}
\cite{test}
\printbibliography
\end{document}

I've loaded expl3 for a prebuild 'replace all' command, but this could be recoded without expl3. As that's not the key point here I've not bothered!

First version

Most of the work required here is to get the data out of biblatex's internal format and correctly escape into a URL string. That's particularly true for the author part, which is tricky as there are various braces to strip. I've decided to tackle this using the experimental LaTeX3 l3str module (edit: in January 2013 encoding functions moved to l3str-convert), which includes code for the URL encoding, along with the general LaTeX3 programming support system to do all of the construction. (You have to do the encoding in bits so that + is left unencoded between fields you are passing.)

\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@article{test,
  author = {Doe, J. and Other, Arthur N.},
  title  = {Rocket Science},
  year   = {1999},
}
\end{filecontents}
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{expl3,l3str-convert}
\usepackage[backend=bibtex]{biblatex}
\bibliography{\jobname}
\ExplSyntaxOn
\str_new:N \__searchurl_search_str
\str_new:N \__searchurl_tmp_str
\tl_new:N \__searchurl_tmp_tl
\cs_new_protected_nopar:Npn \createsearchurl
  {
    \str_set:Nn \__searchurl_search_str
      { http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q= }
    \savefield* { year } { \__searchurl_tmp_tl }
    \cs_if_exist:NT \__searchurl_tmp_tl
      { \str_put_right:NV \__searchurl_search_str \__searchurl_tmp_tl }
    \clist_map_function:nN { title , journal } \__searchurl_add_field:n
    \savename* { author } { \__searchurl_tmp_tl }
    \cs_if_exist:NT \__searchurl_tmp_tl
      { \__searchurl_convert_authors: }
    \restorefield { url } { \__searchurl_search_str }
  }
\cs_new_protected:Npn \__searchurl_add_field:n #1
  {
    \savefield* {#1} { \__searchurl_tmp_tl }
    \cs_if_exist:NT \__searchurl_tmp_tl
      {
        \str_set_convert:NVnn \__searchurl_tmp_str
          \__searchurl_tmp_tl { } { latin1 / url }  
        \str_put_left:Nn \__searchurl_tmp_str { + }
        \str_put_right:NV \__searchurl_search_str \__searchurl_tmp_str   
      }
  }
\cs_new_protected_nopar:Npn \__searchurl_convert_authors:
  {
    \exp_after:wN \__searchurl_convert_authors:nn
      \__searchurl_tmp_tl
  }
\cs_new_protected_nopar:Npn \__searchurl_convert_authors:nn #1#2
  {
    \tl_map_inline:nn {#2} 
      { \__searchurl_convert_authors:nnnnnnnnn ##1 }
  }
\group_begin:
  \char_set_catcode_active:N \~
  \char_set_catcode_space:N \ %
  \cs_new_protected_nopar:Npn\__searchurl_convert_authors:nnnnnnnnn%
    #1#2#3#4#5#6#7#8#9%
    {%
      \tl_set:Nn\__searchurl_tmp_tl{#2}%
      \tl_replace_all:Nnn\__searchurl_tmp_tl{~}{ }% 
      \str_set_convert:NVnn\__searchurl_tmp_str
        \__searchurl_tmp_tl{}{latin1/url}%
      \str_put_left:Nn\__searchurl_tmp_str{+}%
      \str_put_right:NV\__searchurl_search_str\__searchurl_tmp_str
    }%
\group_end:
\cs_generate_variant:Nn \str_set_convert:Nnnn { NV }
\cs_generate_variant:Nn \str_put_right:Nn { NV }
\ExplSyntaxOff

\newbibmacro*{url+urldate}{%
  \iffieldundef{url}
    {\createsearchurl}
    {}%
  \printfield{url}%
  \iffieldundef{urlyear}
    {}
    {\setunit*{\addspace}%
     \printurldate}}

\begin{document}
\cite{test}
\printbibliography
\end{document}

I've build the search to use author surnames only, with any non-breaking spaces converted to normal ones before encoding.

As PLK notes, this could probably be done rather more easily using biber at an earlier stage!