Monday, August 29, 2005

Citeulike

I'm not sure where I came across this, but CiteULike is a bit of a revelation. As they say themselves, CiteULike
is a free service to help academics to share, store, and organise the academic papers they are reading. When you see a paper on the web that interests you, you can click one button and have it added to your personal library. CiteULike automatically extracts the citation details, so there's no need to type them in yourself. It all works from within your web browser. There's no need to install any special software.
Moreover, 'because your library is stored on the server, you can access it from any computer,' which is good news for me who was just thinking last week about trying to coordinate Endnote files between several computers. Though this wouldn't help in terms of old citations: I can't upload my current Endnote database to CiteULike since I'd have to convert it into a BibTex database before uploading (and I can't get that right).

Moreover, since all the citations are open access, CiteULike acts a little bit like Flickr's tagging system, so you can theoretically see what everyone else is reading too.

For the moment I'm not sure that I'll use the facility as my main database, but it's a handy way of collecting things together on a web-trawl and keeping them their in lieu of exporting to Endnote.

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