March 24, 2005

CiteULike for web-based bibliography creation

There has been some discussion in Biblioblogdom by AKMA, Stephen Carlson, and Mark Goodacre regarding the availability of online journal articles. On the Macintosh Bibilioblog, we've had some previous discussion regarding bibliographical software, so all this prompted me to make everyone aware of a web-based bibliographic record solution that is geared towards creating a list of online articles that you want to reference.

CiteULike is a "free online service to organize your academic papers." You can think of it as a web-based version of Endnote or Bookends, but where it really shines is in allowing you to create entries based upon online journal articles or books that you are currently viewing in your web browser. The auto-cite functionality is of limited use to us, since the list of compatible journal sites is rather small (It includes searching services such as JSOT and Amazon). Still, consider the easy capture from Amazon:

  1. Find a book on Amazon
  2. Click the CiteULike bookmark bar button
  3. A bibliographic reference to the book is automatically added to your bibliography
You can give citations tags or categories, and organize them as such. But consider this, you can see what other articles and their references have been posted by any other users using the same tag. In theory at least, that has tremendous appeal.
Finally, you can always export your CiteULike bibs to BibTex/Endnote format.

It won't be everyone's cup of tea, but depending on your work activities, it just might be worth a look.

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