About a year ago I discovered del.icio.us and fell in love with social bookmarking. On practical grounds, I like having all my bookmarks available from any computer. On less practical grounds, the whole tagging/folksonomy thing appeals to the part of me that wants to be a cataloger. It’s like adding Library of Congress subject headings except that you get to make them up as you go along. Also, you get to nose around and see what other people are tagging.
del.icio.us does what it does very effectively. It’s a great manager for web links and a great way to discover new stuff based on what others have tagged. But what about when the thing you want to tag is an article you found in a database and may not even have a stable URL? This brings us to the realm of what I’m going to call “social bibliography.” Social bibliography is what happens when a bibliographic management tool (like EndNote or Zotero) mates with a social bookmarking platform (like del.icio.us). Two of the big names in this relatively new field are CiteULike and Connotea.
I decided to go with CiteULike, mostly because it integrates with LibX to help you import citation data. Connotea, however, has a cooler name and is open-source. Both services are free. Like del.icio.us, I can easily direct my friends to a page where they can see all the items in my library or, for instance, just those items tagged as “tomography.” The part that is really exciting, though, is that if I find an article in, say, PubMed, all I have to do is click on my CiteULike bookmarklet to store all of the article’s bibliographic information (even the abstract) into my account. So, where del.icio.us can only store a URL and a short descriptive blurb, CiteULike stores a complete citation and, if you like, a full pdf of the document. You can literally have your whole library of articles available to you anywhere. And yes, it will format your references for you in more than a dozen different styles. Finally, it can export and import reference lists in RIS or BibTeX format, so it can play nicely with most other bibliographic management systems.
So far I’ve talked about the bibliographic management aspects of CiteULike, but a potential co-author and I are also making use of its social capabilities. We created a group in CiteULike where we can both contribute articles and post comments on the articles. CiteULike is proving to be a highly useful environment for collaboration. And, finally, a few days ago I got an e-mail from a friend of mine (hi Greg!) who found my CiteULike page while doing some research on his own. Another potential co-author?