Thanks
to Andrei Sobolevskii for his comment
pointing me to a wonderful initiative : CiteULike.
What is CiteULike?
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.
Because your library is stored on the server, you
can access it from any computer. You can share you library with others,
and find out who is reading the same papers as you. In turn, this can
help you discover literature which is relevant to your field but you may
not have known about.
When it comes to writing up your
results in a paper, you can export your library to either BibTeX or
Endnote to build it in to your bibliography. CiteULike has a flexible
filing system, so you actually stand a chance of being able to find that
article that you stored a few months ago when you need
it.
If all this seems too abstract, here is an excellent practical
introduction (also suggested by Andrei). This text focusses on
articles from AnthroSource but if you’re a mathematician, do the
same things when you are at the abstract page of a paper on the arXiv or a paper description from MathSciNet. The really nice
thing is that you virtually have to do no typing at all (apart from the
tags you want to add to classify the paper where you want it or, if you
want, to add a note about the paper). Another exciting feature
is that you can upload your personal copy of the paper. A typical
situation : most of us can get the PDF-file of a published paper at work
(because the university has a contract with the publisher) but not at
home, on the road or on vacation. So, while at work, download the PDF,
upload it as your personal copy to citeUlike and you can read that paper
wherever you have internet access! But there is more : you can
export the BibTeX-data of your whole library and use it in your next
paper, every library has its separate RSS-feed so you can feed it to a
news-aggregator (or to bloglines) to find out whether someone with
similar interests added a new paper to his/her library, you can create
Groups that is collections of Libraries of people interested in the same
topic, so that others can help you finding stuff of value (and again,
such Group-libraries have there own RSS-feed so….), all libraries
have all tags used by the Library-owner in a graphical format, the
larger the tag-text the more it is used in the Library, so just by
looking at the right-sidebar you get a good idea what the person’s
interests are, etc. etc. etc. I’m just two days into
citeUlike and there will be tons of features I still have to discover
and I’ll report on this later. At the moment I just added a few
papers to my Library but I will extend this drasticly in the weeks
ahead. If you want to check on my progress here is lieven’s Library
or the citeIlike link in the header of this blog (between the
‘about me’ and the ’search’ link) and I hope
that many of you will add similar buttons on your homepages.
Finally, if you are interested in Noncommutative algebraic and/or
differential geometry, I’ve set up a Group-Library
NoncommutativeGeometry. At the moment it’s just identical to
my own Library, but please register to citeUlike, set up your own
Library and if you’re into NOG join this group!
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