CiteULike
Encyclopedia
CiteULike is based on the principle of social bookmarking
Social bookmarking
Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to organize, store, manage and search for bookmarks of resources online. Unlike file sharing, the resources themselves aren't shared, merely bookmarks that reference them....
and is aimed to promote and to develop the sharing of scientific references amongst researchers. In the same way that it is possible to catalog web page
Web page
A web page or webpage is a document or information resource that is suitable for the World Wide Web and can be accessed through a web browser and displayed on a monitor or mobile device. This information is usually in HTML or XHTML format, and may provide navigation to other web pages via hypertext...
s (with Furl
Furl
Furl was a free social bookmarking website that allowed members to store searchable copies of webpages and share them with others. Every member received 5 gigabytes of storage space. The site was founded by Mike Giles in 2003 and purchased by LookSmart in 2004...
and del.icio.us
Del.icio.us
Delicious is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. The site was founded by Joshua Schachter in 2003 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005, and by the end of 2008, the service claimed more than 5.3 million users and 180 million unique bookmarked URLs...
) or photographs (with Flickr
Flickr
Flickr is an image hosting and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community that was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. In addition to being a popular website for users to share and embed personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers to...
), scientists can share information on academic papers with specific tools (like CiteULike) developed for that purpose. The website is sponsored by the publisher Springer Science+Business Media
Springer Science+Business Media
- Selected publications :* Encyclopaedia of Mathematics* Ergebnisse der Mathematik und ihrer Grenzgebiete * Graduate Texts in Mathematics * Grothendieck's Séminaire de géométrie algébrique...
. Richard Cameron developed CiteULike in November 2004 and in 2006 Oversity Ltd. was established to develop and support CiteULike.
When browsing issues of research journals, small scripts stored in bookmarks (bookmarklet
Bookmarklet
A bookmarklet is Unobtrusive JavaScript stored as the URL of a bookmark in a web browser or as a hyperlink on a web page. The term is a portmanteau of the terms bookmark and applet, however, an applet is not to be confused with a bookmarklet just as JavaScript is not to be confused with Java...
s) allow one to import articles from repositories like PubMed
PubMed
PubMed is a free database accessing primarily the MEDLINE database of references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics. The United States National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health maintains the database as part of the Entrez information retrieval system...
, and CiteULike supports many more. Then the system attempts to determine the article metadata (title, authors, journal name, etc.) automatically. Users can organize their libraries with freely chosen tags
Tag (metadata)
In online computer systems terminology, a tag is a non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information . This kind of metadata helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching...
and this produces a folksonomy
Folksonomy
A folksonomy is a system of classification derived from the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content; this practice is also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging...
of academic interests.
Basic principles
In a first step, one adds a reference to CiteULike directly from within the web browserWeb browser
A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content...
, without needing a separate programme. For common online database like PubMed
PubMed
PubMed is a free database accessing primarily the MEDLINE database of references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics. The United States National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health maintains the database as part of the Entrez information retrieval system...
, author names, title, and other details are imported automatically. One can manually add tags
Tag (metadata)
In online computer systems terminology, a tag is a non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information . This kind of metadata helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching...
for grouping of references. The web site can be used to search public references by all users or only one's own references. References can later be exported via BibTeX
BibTeX
BibTeX is reference management software for formatting lists of references. The BibTeX tool is typically used together with the LaTeX document preparation system...
or EndNote
EndNote
EndNote is a commercial reference management software package, used to manage bibliographies and references when writing essays and articles. It is produced by Thomson Reuters.- Features :...
to be used on local computers.
Creation of entries and definition of keywords
CiteULike provides bookmarklets http://www.citeulike.org/post to quickly add references from the web pages of the most common sites http://www.citeulike.org/post_url.adp. These small scriptsScripting language
A scripting language, script language, or extension language is a programming language that allows control of one or more applications. "Scripts" are distinct from the core code of the application, as they are usually written in a different language and are often created or at least modified by the...
read the citation information from the web page and import into the CiteULike database for the currently logged in user.
Sites supported for semi-automatic import include Amazon.com
Amazon.com
Amazon.com, Inc. is a multinational electronic commerce company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, United States. It is the world's largest online retailer. Amazon has separate websites for the following countries: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and...
, arXiv.org, JSTOR
JSTOR
JSTOR is an online system for archiving academic journals, founded in 1995. It provides its member institutions full-text searches of digitized back issues of several hundred well-known journals, dating back to 1665 in the case of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society...
, PLoS, PubMed
PubMed
PubMed is a free database accessing primarily the MEDLINE database of references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics. The United States National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health maintains the database as part of the Entrez information retrieval system...
, SpringerLink, and ScienceDirect
ScienceDirect
ScienceDirect is one of the largest online collections of published scientific research in the world. It is operated by the publisher Elsevier and contains nearly 10 million articles from over 2,500 journals and over 6,000 e-books, reference works, book series and handbooks issued by Elsevier...
. It is also possible although more time consuming to add entries manually.
Entries can be tagged
Tag (metadata)
In online computer systems terminology, a tag is a non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information . This kind of metadata helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching...
for easier retrieval and organisation. More frequent tags are displayed in a proportionally larger font. Tags can be clicked to call up articles containing this tag.
Sharing and exporting entries
New entries are added as public by default, which makes them accessible to everyone. Entries can be added as private and are then only available to the specific user. Users of CiteULike thus automatically share all their public entries with other users. The tags assigned to public entries contribute to the site-wide tag network. All public references can also be searched and filtered by tag.In addition, the site provides groups that users can join themselves or by invitation. Groups are typically labs, institutions, professions, or research areas.
On line CiteULike entries can be downloaded to a local computer by means of export functions. A first export format is BibTeX
BibTeX
BibTeX is reference management software for formatting lists of references. The BibTeX tool is typically used together with the LaTeX document preparation system...
, the referencing system used in TeX
TeX
TeX is a typesetting system designed and mostly written by Donald Knuth and released in 1978. Within the typesetting system, its name is formatted as ....
and LaTeX
LaTeX
LaTeX is a document markup language and document preparation system for the TeX typesetting program. Within the typesetting system, its name is styled as . The term LaTeX refers only to the language in which documents are written, not to the editor used to write those documents. In order to...
. The RIS file format
RIS (file format)
RIS is a standardized tag format developed by Research Information Systems, Incorporated to enable citation programs to exchange data.It is supported by a number of reference managers...
is also available for commercial bibliography programs such as EndNote
EndNote
EndNote is a commercial reference management software package, used to manage bibliographies and references when writing essays and articles. It is produced by Thomson Reuters.- Features :...
or Reference Manager
Reference Manager
Reference Manager is a commercial reference management software package sold by Thomson Reuters. It was the first commercial software of its kind, originally developed by Ernest Beutler and his son, Earl Beutler, in 1982 through their company Research Information Systems...
. It also allows to import into the free Zotero
Zotero
Zotero is free, open source reference management software to manage bibliographic data and related research materials . Notable features include web browser integration, online syncing, generation of in-text citations, footnotes and bibliographies, as well as integration with the word processors...
bibliography extension of Firefox. Export is possible for individual entries or the entire library.
CiteULike gives access to personal or shared bibliographies directly from the web. It allows one to see what other people have posted publicly, which tags they have added, and how they have commented and rated a paper. It is also possible to browse the public libraries of people with similar interests to discover interesting papers. Groups allow individual users to collaborate with other users to build a library of references. The data are backed up daily from the central server.
Code used
The code behind CiteULike is a mix of TclTcl
Tcl is a scripting language created by John Ousterhout. Originally "born out of frustration", according to the author, with programmers devising their own languages intended to be embedded into applications, Tcl gained acceptance on its own...
, Common Lisp
Common Lisp
Common Lisp, commonly abbreviated CL, is a dialect of the Lisp programming language, published in ANSI standard document ANSI INCITS 226-1994 , . From the ANSI Common Lisp standard the Common Lisp HyperSpec has been derived for use with web browsers...
, Perl
Perl
Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Perl was originally developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier. Since then, it has undergone many changes and revisions and become widely popular...
, and Erlang; data is stored using PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL, often simply Postgres, is an object-relational database management system available for many platforms including Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, MS Windows and Mac OS X. It is released under the PostgreSQL License, which is an MIT-style license, and is thus free and open source software...
There is no API
Application programming interface
An application programming interface is a source code based specification intended to be used as an interface by software components to communicate with each other...
but plugins can be contributed using Subversion. The software behind the service is closed source, but the dataset collected by the users is in the public domain
Public domain
Works are in the public domain if the intellectual property rights have expired, if the intellectual property rights are forfeited, or if they are not covered by intellectual property rights at all...
.
About the site
The site stemmed from personal scientific requirements. The initial author found existing bibliography software cumbersome .CiteULike was created in November 2004 and further developed in December 2006. The site is based in the UK. The service is free and is run independently of any particular publisher with a liberal privacy policy.
See also
- Reference management softwareReference management softwareReference management software, citation management software or personal bibliographic management software is software for scholars and authors to use for recording and utilising bibliographic citations . Once a citation has been recorded, it can be used time and again in generating bibliographies,...
- Comparison of reference management softwareComparison of reference management software- General :In the "notes" section, there is a difference between:* web-based, referring to applications that may be installed on a web server...
- Social mediaSocial mediaThe term Social Media refers to the use of web-based and mobile technologies to turn communication into an interactive dialogue. Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein define social media as "a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0,...