Talk:Refbase

This article was nominated for deletion on 3 December 2025. The result of the discussion was keep.

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Categorization

Is there a reason this is classified as a "bibliographic database?" It appears to be purely "reference management software," as it is a software package. Steve3003 21:15, 2 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

There are multiple publicly accessible databases that use refbase as a backend, such as USGS-Woods Hole. Since this article doesn't discuss those particular databases, I'm not strongly opposed to removing the cat. I think it could be useful to have a subcat under both bibliographic databases and reference management software for the commonly used web-based managers (at ~10K records each, these tend to be much larger than mere reference managers & a bit smaller than notable bibliographic databases). --Karnesky 23:06, 2 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps products that serve as backends belong in their own category? I see a number of similar products that don't seem to have a real category: refbase, DSpace, Greenstone, Eprints, and perhaps Fedora. Could all these products be called "institutional repository software," or "web-based managers" (as you mentioned), or something similar?

I'm guessing the primary difference between these and "reference management software" is having real scalability and providing a web interface? Perhaps "reference management software" is more something that runs on a client workstation and has some level of document editor integration? (Does refbase do client integration too?) Steve3003 00:08, 3 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

W.r.t. client integration: While refbase can generate a bibliography from an office document that contains manually placed in-text citations, refbase currently does not offer a macro & palette to allow direct database access from within office desktop applications (more info). This is a planned feature, though. Matthias Steffens 18:00, 8 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Secondary sources

The article is currently tagged as Unreferenced. There are a couple of claims where I think a citation would be needed so I marked them as such. However, outside of pages like this one I cannot find any regular secondary sources.

@Karnesky , @MSteffens I think you are the original authors, correct? Would you be able to assist? SmallMender (talk) 20:55, 23 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I cleaned up the article today and in this edit removed the unsourced claims: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Refbase&diff=prev&oldid=1238999006 SmallMender (talk) 20:07, 6 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@SmallMender There's, for example, an article by Lambert Heller (published in 2007 in a German journal, fulltext) which discusses refbase as one of the first open source software solutions for collaborative reference management. refbase was also integrated by other tools such as the German search platform beluga & PIRA, discussed in academic theses (e.g. by P.J.Cobb, M.Thummala & X.Wan+T.Wang) and used worldwide as an institutional publication repository (e.g. CVC, ISCRAM, IFIC, SLN, ISMMS & VetSRev). Matthias Steffens (talk) 14:45, 3 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

There's also a thesis (by S.Bugla) that mainly deals with refbase as a base for their implementation, and there are various publications & academic papers that briefly mention refbase (e.g. Wilkinson+Collins 2007, Bahadoran et al. 2020 & Jimenez et al. 2022). Matthias Steffens (talk) 17:08, 3 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]