Cafebr - Citation Amender/Formatter for Biological Research

A reference list is an essential part of a manuscript for an academic article. It is often necessary to reformat (i.e., change orders of pieces of article information such as authors, article title, publication year, and journal where the article was published) of a preformatted reference list when a manuscript is declined by one journal and submitted to another. EndNote, Zotero and Mendeley are examples of sophisticated reference management programs that help generate a reference list with less errors. However, their multifunctionality seems to have complicated the process of generating a reference list: they require many selection steps to obtain a final output, and also require to manually edit a file outside the execuiton program even to make small changes in the output. The author developed a program, Cafebr (Citation Amender/Formatter for Biological Research), to more simply generate a reference list for an article of biological research. It is written in HTML/JavaScript, and as such works on a web browser on any platform. On Cafebr, articles for a final reference list can be either given by a user or collected from PubMed. Pieces of article information are then extracted according to the format of these articles or to the delimiters designated by a user. Preset formats for output are currently only four, but all of them can be directly edited on the user interface, allowing to change output formats quickly and flexibly. All of the functions of Cafebr is available on its website (either http://stdtgm.itigo.jp/cafebr/cafebr.html (main) or http://studtsugama.s1006.xrea.com/cafebr/cafebr.xhtm (backup)) with aids of a CGI program. A stand-alone version of Cafebr is available at these websites or Zenodo (10.5281/zenodo.1404887).