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https://github.com/whiskyechobravo/kerko

A web application component that provides a faceted search interface for bibliographies managed with Zotero.
https://github.com/whiskyechobravo/kerko

academia bibliographies bibliography faceted-search flask flask-blueprint python scholar search search-interface webapp whoosh zotero zotero-api

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A web application component that provides a faceted search interface for bibliographies managed with Zotero.

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README 

        
[![License](https://img.shields.io/pypi/l/kerko)][Kerko]

[![Version](https://img.shields.io/pypi/v/kerko?color=informational)][Kerko_pypi]

[![Tests status](https://github.com/whiskyechobravo/kerko/workflows/tests/badge.svg)][Kerko_actions]



# Kerko



[Kerko] is a web application component that provides a user-friendly search and

browsing interface for sharing a bibliography managed with the [Zotero]

reference manager.



The combination of Kerko and Zotero gives you the best of both worlds: a rich

but easy to use web interface for end-users of the bibliography, and a

well-established and powerful bibliographic reference management tool for

individuals or teams working on the bibliography's content.



## Demo site



A [KerkoApp]-based [demo site][KerkoApp_demo] is available for you to try. You

may also view the [Zotero library][Zotero_demo] that contains the source data

for the demo site.



## Powered by Kerko



Here are some sites that are powered by Kerko:



- [Bibliographie francophone sur l'archivistique](https://bibliopiaf.ebsi.umontreal.ca/)

- [Bibliographie sur l'histoire de Montréal](https://bibliographies.uqam.ca/bhm/)

- [Community Knowledge Open Library on English-Speaking Quebec](https://ckol.quescren.ca/)

- [Lipedema Foundation LEGATO Lipedema Library](https://library.lipedema.org/)

- [Open Development & Education Evidence Library](https://docs.opendeved.net/)

- [Rights and Records Knowledge Base](https://rightsandrecords.ica.org/)

- [The EdTech Hub Evidence Library](https://docs.edtechhub.org/)

- [Transitional Justice Evaluation Tools Reference Library](https://library.transitionaljusticedata.org/)

- [University of Saint Joseph Research Output](https://research.usj.edu.mo/)



## Features



The main features provided by Kerko are:



- **Faceted search interface**: allows exploration of the bibliography both in

  search mode and in browsing mode, potentially suiting different user needs,

  behaviors, and abilities. For example, users with a prior idea of the topic or

  expected results may enter keywords or a more complex query in a search field,

  while those who wish to become familiar with the content of the bibliography

  or discover new topics may choose to navigate along the proposed facets, to

  narrow or broaden their search. Since both modes are integrated into a single

  interface, it is possible to combine them.

- **Keyword search** features:

    - Boolean operators:

        - `AND`: matches items that contain all specified terms. This is the

          default relation between terms when no operator is specified, e.g.,

          `a b` is the same as `a AND b`.

        - `OR`: matches items that contain any of the specified terms, e.g.,

          `a OR b`.

        - `NOT`: excludes items that match the term, e.g., `NOT a`.

        - Boolean operators must be specified in uppercase and may be translated

          in other languages.

    - Logical grouping (with parentheses), e.g., `(a OR b) AND c`.

    - Sequence of words (with double quotes), e.g., `"a b c"`. The default

      difference between word positions is 1, meaning that an item will match if

      it contains the words next to each other, but a different maximum distance

      may be selected (with the tilde character), e.g. `"web search"~2` allows

      up to 1 word between `web` and `search`, meaning it could match `web site

      search` as well as `web search`.

    - Term boosting (with the caret), e.g., `faceted^2 search browsing^0.5`

      specifies that `faceted` is twice as important as `search` when computing

      the relevance score of results, while `browsing` is half as important.

      Boosting may be applied to a logical grouping, e.g., `(a b)^3 c`.

    - Keyword search is case-insensitive, accents are folded, and punctuation is

      ignored. To further improve recall (albeit at the cost of precision),

      stemming is also performed on terms from most text fields, e.g., title,

      abstract, notes. Stemming relieves the user from having to specify all

      variants of a word when searching, e.g., terms such as `search`,

      `searches`, and `searching` all return the same results. The [Snowball]

      algorithm is used for that purpose.

    - Full-text search: the text content of PDF attachments can be searched.

    - Scope of search: users may choose to search everywhere, in

      author/contributor names, in titles, in publication years, in all fields

      (i.e., in metadata and notes), or in documents (i.e., in the text content

      of attachments). Applications may provide additional choices.

- **Faceted browsing**: allows filtering by topic (Zotero tag), by resource type

  (Zotero item type), by publication year, or by resource language. Moreover,

  you may define additional facets modeled on collections and subcollections; in

  such case, any collection can be represented as a facet, and each

  subcollection as a value within that facet. By taking advantage of Zotero's

  ability to assign any given item to multiple collections, a faceted

  classification scheme can be designed, including hierarchical subdivisions

  within facets.

- **Relevance scoring**: provided by the [Whoosh] library and based on the

  [BM25F] algorithm, which determines how important a term is to a document in

  the context of the whole collection of documents, while taking into account

  its relation to document structure (in this regard most fields are neutral,

  but the score is boosted when a term appears in specific fields, e.g., DOI,

  ISBN, ISSN, title, author/contributor). Any keyword search asks the question

  "how well does this document match this query clause?", which requires

  calculating a relevance score for each document. Filtering with facets, on the

  other hand, has no effect on the score because it asks "does this document

  match this query clause?", which leads to a yes or no answer.

- **Sort options**: by relevance score (only applicable to keyword search), by

  publication date, by author, by title.

- **Citation styles**: any from the [Zotero Style Repository][Zotero_styles], or

  custom stylesheet defined in the [Citation Style Language][CSL] (stylesheet

  must be accessible by URL).

- **Language support**: the default language of the user interface is English,

  but [some translations][Kerko_translations] are provided. Additional

  translations may be created using gettext-compatible tools. Also to consider:

  locales supported by the [Zotero Data Schema][Zotero_schema] (which provides

  the names of fields, item types and author types displayed by Kerko);

  languages supported by Whoosh (which provides the search capabilities), i.e.,

  ar, da, nl, en, fi, fr, de, hu, it, no, pt, ro, ru, es, sv, tr.

- **Semantic markup**: pages generated by Kerko embed HTML markup that can be

  detected by web crawlers (helping the indexing of your records by search

  engines) or by web browsers (allowing users of reference management tools to

  easily import metadata in their library). Supported schemes are:

    - [OpenURL COinS][COinS], in search results pages and individual

      bibliographic record pages. COinS is recognized by [many reference

      management tools][COinS_clients], including the [Zotero

      Connector][Zotero_Connector] browser extension.

    - Highwire Press tags, in the individual bibliographic record pages of book,

      conference paper, journal article, report or thesis items. These tags are

      recommended for indexing by [Google Scholar][HighwirePress_Google], and

      are recognized by many other databases and reference management tools,

      including the [Zotero Connector][Zotero_Connector] browser extension.

- **Web feeds**: users of news aggregators or feed readers may get updates when

  new bibliographic records are added. They may subscribe to the main feed, or

  to one or more custom feeds.

    - The main feed lists the most recently added bibliographic records.

    - Any search page has a related custom feed that lists the most recently

      added bibliographic records that match the search criteria. Thus, a user

      can obtain a custom feed for a particular area of interest simply by

      entering keywords to search and/or selecting filters.

    - Feeds are provided in the [Atom syndication format][Atom].

    - Basic metadata is provided directly in the feeds, using both Atom and

      unqualified [Dublin Core][Dublin_Core] elements.

    - An age limit may be configured to exclude older items from the feeds. This

      may be useful to bibliographies that are frequently updated and mostly

      meant to promote recent literature (all resources still remain visible to

      the search interface regardless of their age).

- **Sitemap**: an [XML Sitemap][XML_Sitemap] is automatically generated, and you

  may use it to help search engines discover your bibliographic records.

- **Exporting**: users may export individual records as well as complete

  bibliographies corresponding to search results. By default, download links are

  provided for the RIS and BibTeX formats, but applications may be configured to

  export [any format supported by the Zotero API][Zotero_export].

- **Printing**: stylesheets are provided for printing individual bibliographic

  records as well as lists of search results. When printing search results, all

  results get printed (not just the current page of results).

- **Notes and attachments**: notes, attached files, and attached links to URIs

  are synchronized from zotero.org and made available to users of the

  bibliography. Regular expressions may be used to include or exclude such child

  items from the bibliography, based on their tags.

- **DOI, ISBN and ISSN resolver**: items that have such identifier in your

  library can be referenced by appending their identifier to your Kerko site's

  base URL.

- **Relations**: bibliographic record pages show links to related items, if any.

  You may define such relations using Zotero's _Related_ field. Moreover, Kerko

  adds the _Cites_ and _Cited by_ relation types, which can be managed in Zotero

  through notes. Custom applications can add more types of relations if desired.

- **Pages**: basic informational pages can be defined using content from Zotero

  standalone notes.

- **Badges**: custom applications can have icons conditionally displayed next to

  items.

- **Responsive design**: the simple default implementation works on large

  monitors as well as on small screens. It is based on [Bootstrap].

- **Google Analytics integration**: just provide a Google Analytics stream ID to

  have Kerko automatically include the tracking code into its pages.

- **Integration**: as a Flask [blueprint][Flask_blueprint], Kerko can be

  integrated into any Flask application. For a standalone application, however,

  you may simply install [KerkoApp].

- **Customizable front-end**: applications may partly or fully replace the

  default templates, scripts and stylesheets with their own.

- **Command line interface (CLI)**: Kerko provides commands for synchronizing or

  deleting its data.



[KerkoApp] is a standalone application built around Kerko. It inherits all of

Kerko's features and it provides a few additions of its own:



- **Configuration files**: allow separation of configuration from code and

  enable the [Twelve-factor App][Twelve-factor_App] methodology. Environment

  variables and [TOML] configuration files are supported. Secrets,

  server-specific parameters, and general parameters can be configured in

  separate files.

- Page templates for common HTTP errors.

- Syslog logging handler (for Unix environments).



## Learn more



Please refer to the [documentation][Kerko_documentation] for more details.



[Atom]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(web_standard)

[BM25F]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okapi_BM25

[Bootstrap]: https://getbootstrap.com/

[CSL]: https://citationstyles.org/

[COinS]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COinS

[COinS_clients]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COinS#Client_tools

[Dublin_Core]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dublin_Core

[Flask]: https://pypi.org/project/Flask/

[Flask_blueprint]: https://flask.palletsprojects.com/en/latest/blueprints/

[Kerko]: https://github.com/whiskyechobravo/kerko

[Kerko_actions]: https://github.com/whiskyechobravo/kerko/actions

[Kerko_documentation]: https://whiskyechobravo.github.io/kerko/

[Kerko_pypi]: https://pypi.org/project/Kerko/

[Kerko_translations]: https://github.com/whiskyechobravo/kerko/tree/main/src/kerko/translations

[KerkoApp]: https://github.com/whiskyechobravo/kerkoapp

[KerkoApp_demo]: https://demo.kerko.whiskyechobravo.com

[Snowball]: https://snowballstem.org/

[TOML]: https://toml.io/

[Twelve-factor_App]: https://12factor.net/config

[Whoosh]: https://pypi.org/project/Whoosh/

[XML_Sitemap]: https://www.sitemaps.org/

[Zotero]: https://www.zotero.org/

[Zotero_Connector]: https://www.zotero.org/download/connectors

[Zotero_demo]: https://www.zotero.org/groups/2348869/kerko_demo/items

[Zotero_export]: https://www.zotero.org/support/dev/web_api/v3/basics#export_formats

[Zotero_schema]: https://api.zotero.org/schema

[Zotero_styles]: https://www.zotero.org/styles/