CiteULike

CiteULike is a free citation management system aimed at academic researchers. In concept, it is akin to commercial products such as RefWorks in that users create an account on the system and, as they discover citations that they would like to refer to later, import that citation into the citation management system.

One place where CiteULike goes its own way is that it actively imports citations from selected "trusted" sources -- mostly journal publishers or distributors -- as new issues are released. The table of contents of current issues of the journals can be browsed on the CiteULike site, exported as EndNote or BibTeX citations, or perused as RSS feeds. For example, in the journal list, I found the current issue listing for Folklore, an academic journal I like to read. With this system, I can now export these citations straight into my CiteULike bibliography.

Another excellent feature is the ability to create and contribute to community-based groups. For instance, I'm a member of my library's web development committee and we will be undertaking usability studies over the course of the next year. CiteULike has a "usability" group that collects citations on that topic. As in the previous example, citations can be exported or read as RSS feeds.

Lastly, CiteULike implements the Dynamic OpenURL concept I described in one of my recent blogs entries. This is a crucial element that allows researchers to be less dependent on Google Scholar than anything else I've yet seen.

Posted by Tom on February 28, 2005