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Citeulike - keeping your bibliography on the web
20 January 2010
By Hannah Dee
I've recently discovered Citeulike, a website that organises your references and bibliographies for you in a nice shiny web2.0 kinda way. As someone who works from homes in France and the UK, from my desk in INPG, from lab machines in Leeds, and from cafes and trains and other places with WIFI, it is really handy being able to access my references from wherever I am. And when this contract ends and I move on, I'll be able to access all my references from wherever I end up, without having to install any software or do any extra work.
Here are the things I really like about it:
- You can install a browser button that lets you post directly to citeulike from various online journals with one click. IEEE Xplore, ACM Digital Library, Springerlink, PubMed, DOI links... Pretty much all the major online journals and databases seem to be covered. This sucks the bibliographic information from an authoritative source directly into your bibliography. No more mis-spelled author names! No more typing anything in! Get the browser button here.
- You can download your bibliography in loads of different formats. I'm a LaTeX person so I choose BibTeX, but you can also get the bibliographical information as RIS, PDF, RTF, Formatted Text, or Delicious. You can also view bibliographies using RSS.
- You can import existing BibTeX and RIS files, so all those references that you HAVE typed in yourself won't represent wasted effort.
- You can tag each entry with keywords of your choice, and you can choose to download your entire library or just those with particular tags. So when you're writing a paper, just make up a tag for that paper, tag each entry you will want to cite, then export it. Et voila! Instant bibliography. And when you want to make a backup, just select "export whole library".
- You can mark your own publications as being yours. This means that you can use citeulike as a dynamic publications list with links to the right places.
There are also lots of social networking functions where you can see people who are close to you in terms of articles they've posted, you can link to specific individuals, and it recommends articles to you based upon the content of your "library". There are also groups and review functions. So like many web2.0 sites, the more you use it the better it gets.
I've contacted the Citeulike people via twitter and told them I'm writing this post, so if you have any specific questions just post a comment.
Sarah Davies20 January 2010 at 05:54 PM
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Thanks, Hannah, this sounds intriguing. I'm currently using a very old, clunky version of Ref Manager on my laptop so I'm tempted to change. Can you tell me, though, does it have a 'cite as you write' function? Or a way of linking your record of the reference to the pdf on your hard drive?
Victor Henning20 January 2010 at 08:32 PM
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Hi Sarah - you can upload PDFs and attach them to CiteULike records. There is no "cite as you write", but CiteULike has a collaboration with us, Mendeley (http://www.mendeley.com), for that. You can link your CiteULike and Mendeley accounts, thereby managing your CiteULike records in a desktop interface. We then provide plugins for Word and OpenOffice to enable "cite as you write". Cheers, Victor
Tennie Videler20 January 2010 at 09:11 PM
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to lower the tone a second, I read 'cellulite' when I first saw your post... my dyslexia is getting worse and I really shouldn't have overindulged over Christmas quite so much....
Hannah Dee21 January 2010 at 09:11 AM
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Hi Victor - I've not tried Mendeley yet but I've heard really good things about it. Thanks for commenting. It's particularly good to hear of the citeulike collaboration - it seems that academic software is finally coming together.
Matthew Salois22 January 2010 at 11:18 AM
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Great suggestion Hannah. I am currently way behind the times and continue to manually type in my references; I am not sure why I stick to such an inefficient method. Two questions: 1) Is Citeulike compatible with LyX (a souped up version of LaTeX)? 2) Will Citeulike provide information on papers that have cited a particulare reference?
Fergus Gallagher22 January 2010 at 11:57 AM
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Matthew. 1) Not that familiar with LyX but I'm pretty certain it can import a bibtex file produced by CiteULike 2) CiteULike is not a full-blown reference manager and it's not intented to be. The emphasis is on (social) discovery and collaboration.
Chris Thomson25 January 2010 at 01:19 PM
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Matthew, 1) Yes you can export BibTex from citeulike quite easily, and then use this in LyX just like you would any other BibTex files. 2) What it does do is useful however, it does tell you who else has the paper on their reading list. This is a nice feature for finding out who else is working in an area.
Chris Thomson25 January 2010 at 01:21 PM
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I've now got over 600 articles on my cite-u-like, perhaps more scary than that is that I have certainly read more than that since I started my PhD. http://www.citeulike.org/user/smogit
Matthew Salois25 January 2010 at 09:43 PM
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Hi Chris, Thank you for the information. I just started recently using LyX (I am far from an advanced user), but it has served me quite well and has taken over as my word processor of choice. I certainly like the feature you describe incitulike. That sounds like a great way to extend the arms of research!