How to be a better researcher using Mozilla

(and possibly other browsers)
Yes, that's right, I am going to tell you how to be a more productive member of the research community by using tools effectively. More specifically, I am talking about my favorite web browser, Mozilla. This may also work with other browsers; you'll have to try.

Keyboardlets

I call these keyboardlets, by analogy to bookmarklets, the bookmarks that can do more.

Unlike regular bookmarklets, that are designed to be clicked on to do their magic, keyboardlets can be invoked without having to reach for the mouse.

An Example

If I am looking for a paper called, say, "Small Byzantine Quorum Systems", all I have to do is type "cs Small Byzantine Quorum Systems" in the location bar, and I'm transported to the relevant page in CiteSeer. Isn't that great?

screenshot

What I like most about this is that I never have to leave the keyboard, but this magic should also be useful for the mouse addicts among us.

Some keyboardlets are marked "defaults to selection". This means that you can simply select the text on the web page (for example the name of some paper you want to look up) and then simply type, for example, "cs" in the location bar to automatically look that paper up in citeseer.

Get Your Keyboardlet

I put together a few keyboardlets that I think should be of interest to researchers. Here is how to set them up.
  1. First add the links below to your bookmarks (for example by right-clicking them and selecting "File bookmark").
  2. Then (and that step is important), you have to go to each of these bookmarks and open the "properties" dialog (for example by right-clicking on the bookmark and selecting "properties").
  3. In this dialog, locate the "keyword" text field and type the shortcut there. For example for CiteSeer you would have to type "cs" there (without the quotes, of course).
  4. That's it! Now if you type the shortcut in the location bar, followed by the name of a publication, Mozilla will search it for you.

purpose link shortcut
CiteSeer (defaults to selection) cs = citeseer cs
ACM Digital Library acm = Digital Library acm
IEEE Xplore ieee = Xplore ieee
DBLP title lookup dblp = DBLP title search dblp
NCSTRL ancestral = NCSTRL ancestral
Paper Search ps = paper search ps
MathWorld mw = mathworld mw
Google (defaults to selection) g=google g
Google "feeling lucky" (defaults to selection) gg=lucky google gg
Altavista (defaults to selection) av = altavista av
Vivisimo vi = vivisimo vi
Acronym lookup acro = acronym lookup acro
RFC lookup RFC (Request For Comments) rfc
Read a technical note from Dijkstra ewd = lookup EWD ewd

I found out about keyboardlets there; they have other examples too. You should also read grayrest's bookmarks for more advanced tricks (I use his POST technique for the dblp keyboardlet).

Here are some extra keyboardlets. They are not directly research-related and should be of interest to a wider audience.

purpose link shortcut
English->French translation ef = English -> French ef
French->English translation fe = French -> English fe
German <-> English translation (defaults to selection) de = German <-> English de
Merriam Webster Dictionary mwd = Webster mwd
Oxford English Dictionary oed oed
Wikipedia lookup (updated) wiki = wikipedia wiki
freedb song lookup freedb = title lookup freedb
validate (defaults to current page) validate = w3 validator validate
internet movie database imdb = name and title search imdb
Zap embeds zap zap

See Also

If you are interested in research in computer science then you should also check out the Paper Search meta search engine.

And if you're interested in enhancing Mozilla then you should check out this page about selectively blocking flash.

You can find more bookmarklets at http://wormus.com/leakytap/Internet/CustomKeywords

Build your own

Keyboardlets are really simple: they are regular bookmarks that contain the string "%s". The first instance of this string gets replaced by whatever you typed after the shortcut in the location bar (if anything). This makes it possible to build a keyboardlet for any web page that uses forms!

Talk to me

Other browsers reportedly support bookmarklets too, so this trick may work with other browsers as well. Please let me know about your experiences with other browsers - I'll post a list here of the other browsers that you tell me support (or not) keyboardlets.

Also, if you have other interesting keyboardlets, let me know! I can post them here for everyone to enjoy.

[JP Martin] [resources] [contact information]

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