Product Pipeline

Melissa L. Rethlefsen looks at social reference managers and what they mean for librarians

By Melissa L. Rethlefsen, netConnect -- netConnect, 10/15/2006

Bookmarking and sharing web sites is great, but what about storing and sharing other types of resources, like journal articles and book citations? Social reference managers are the answer, because they allow users to bookmark, tag, store, and share regular web resources, Even more, they can parse and manage citation information, with or without links to online resources. These programs are designed primarily with the academic or researcher in mind—most work hand in hand with e-journal vendors, institutional repositories, and other sources of online scholarly materials. The two most popular social reference managers, CiteULike and Connotea, also let users import and export data to and from desktop bibliographic management software programs like EndNote, though it takes a little finesse.

CiteULike is the oldest of the social reference managers, begun in November 2004, and the most multidisciplinary. It is heavily used in the humanities, social sciences, and information sciences. Like other social bookmarking tools, CiteULike offers user-defined tagging. Tags are browsable from the main CiteULike page’s tag cloud of popular terms, or are searchable. Tag clouds are also available for navigation in each user’s library. Like del.icio.us and other social bookmarking tools, RSS feeds exist for every combination of user and tags, plus for tables of contents from over 6000 journals. Each set of references, by user, tag, or both, can also be exported directly into EndNote or other bibliographic management software via the BibTeX format. Author names are also treated like tags—all author names are links to more articles by the same author. Supported journal titles also operate as tags.

Unlike working with most social bookmarking tools, users clicking on the article or source title for an entry will not go directly to the article or web page but instead to the CiteULike record for that item. This record is a treasure trove of information. Not only is the full citation information included, but links to all known online versions of the article are listed, including links to full text or abstracts in journals, databases, and institutional repositories. Users can customize records by adding private or public notes to each item. Additionally, each CiteULike user who tagged the article is listed, as well as all the tags used to describe the article. Book records display available images and give links to Amazon.com and its local affiliates. Perhaps the coolest trick up CiteULike’s sleeve is the TouchGraph visualization that displays related articles (Java required). Using the TouchGraph, users can see and manipulate connections among articles, an excellent visualization and discovery tool.

CiteULike will also host personal copies of PDF articles. When you upload a PDF, an icon will show up for that article when you are logged into your account. Upload the PDF to Cite ULike and access it from any computer where you are logged in.

CiteULike is a tad purist; it emphasizes scholarly literature and citations, and though it will allow users to bookmark general web resources, it will not feature them on the main CiteULike page. Unapproved sites are essentially hidden from the public’s view unless you search Cite ULike—that’s when a large number of articles with the handy title “untitled” appear. While this is an excellent feature for those wishing to avoid spam and find literature in disciplines CiteULike does approve, it leaves disciplines like molecular biology out in the cold, a field dependent on general web resources. Another editorial control on CiteULike is the groups feature. Users who want to form a collaborative group on CiteULike must seek permission, which appears to be generally granted. Getting approval places enough of a burden on the user that many groups have zero users.

For librarians: CiteULike has been adopted by many in the library world, particularly in academic libraries. Keeping up-to-date on library journal literature may be as easy as subscribing to a Cite ULike RSS feed. Collaborating with a long-distance colleague? CiteULike is an excellent way to share new articles on your topic. Joining or monitoring an existing CiteULike group can help keep subject specialists current in other fields. Since CiteULike has already been fairly widely adopted in academia, academic librarians may need to field questions about using CiteULike through library resources, or offer training sessions.

Nature Publishing Group’s New Technology department developed and manages Connotea, an open source social reference manager geared toward science researchers. The tag cloud of Connotea’s most frequently used tags clearly displays this science bias—instead of most popular tags like learning and language, Connotea’s most popular tags include AvianFlu, autism, and microarray. Connotea openly claims del.icio.us (see LJ netConnect, Summer 2006, p. 16–17) as its inspiration, and it succeeds in mimicking the ease of use and utility of del.icio.us in most respects. Where it hasn’t yet captured del.icio.us’s good qualities, we can certainly expect that it shortly will. Connotea is under constant development and introduces frequent improvements, including packaged source distributions of the code that runs the site.

Like CiteULike, Connotea can automatically parse citation data from a number of e-journals and electronic resources, including (not too surprisingly) Nature Publishing journals, Science, D-Lib, HighWire, BioMed Central, and a number of institutional repositories. In fact, Connotea integrates seamlessly into EPrints servers to provide frequently used tags, links to related materials, and other value-added services. The first Eprints server to test Connotea is the ECS EPrints at Southampton University. Connotea recently announced that it is able to parse blog posts in addition to the more scholarly materials, though this feature is restricted to newer posts, as Connotea pulls the data from associated RSS and Atom feeds.

Connotea, though a del.icio.us derivative, has a number of unique features. For example, Connotea users can not only add notes, annotations, and tags to their citations but also claim authorship on materials—an excellent tool for networking and sharing information among scholars. Connotea also allows multiword tags. This is not necessarily an improvement over del.icio.us and its ilk, but it does make tag choice a little easier; there is no need to deliberate over using socialbookmarking, social-bookmarking, SocialBookmarking, social_bookmarking, or social/bookmarking as in del.icio.us (yes, they all exist). One of the most useful features is a list of other users who use that tag and the frequency with which they use it—perfect for finding like-minded individuals.

Connotea is not as easily navigable as del.icio.us, nor so transparent; figuring out how to get back to point A is not always obvious, especially when you aren’t logged into your account. Adding a second tag to your search is likewise not intuitive—you can edit the URL similarly to del.icio.us (adding plus marks between tags), but that’s the only way I’ve found. Otherwise you can search “all” for titles, tags, and descriptions or by exact tag. Other features are standard social bookmarking tools: RSS feeds are available for every user/tag combination, groups can be created for better sharing among colleagues, and related tags and users appear as navigation. Users have the option to mark specific posts private as well. Unlike with del.icio.us, popular bookmarks are ranked for total users who bookmarked, not a combination of currency and popularity. Connotea also has wiki functionality; users can create wiki pages with user profiles, tag descriptions, and more.

For librarians: Medical, science, and academic librarians in particular will want to take note of Connotea. Funding from Nature means it is likely to become more and more integral to scientists and scientific literature and ensures long-term stability. Connotea is also open source, making it another excellent option for enterprise social bookmarking, as is already playing out with its integration into EPrints repositories. Its importing and exporting features let it play nice with any program that can translate RIS data like EndNote, Reference Manager, etc. In August, Connotea also released EndNote format and BibTeX importing/exporting capabilities.

BibSonomy is a combination social bookmarking/social reference manager designed for scholars and developed by researchers at the University of Kassel, Germany. This duality is clearly reflected on its home page, which is a two-column scrolling list of the most currently posted items, one column for bookmarks and one for publications. The social reference manager half works with BibTeX; citations can be imported and exported in BibTeX format. Unlike CiteULike and Connotea, which can recognize some publications and automatically import them, the BibTeX format is in fact necessary to upload items to BibSonomy (unless citations are manually entered). This works nicely with Google Scholar, for example, where exporting into BibTeX is an option. Exporting in EndNote and XML formats is available for every tag and user.

BibSonomy most resembles del.icio.us: URL structure, tag combination capabilities, and even the colors and design ape del.icio.us. The other similarity to del.icio.us is BibSonomy’s friends feature—a tool somewhat like del.icio.us’s networking tools but with a unique twist. All posts can be public, private, or for “friends” or a specified group only. Another unique and valuable feature is the ability to pick, or mark, whole sets or selected citations for download.

Complore is a newer social reference manager that feels more like a traditional social networking tool. Like the other tools discussed above, Complore emphasizes group databases; unlike the other tools, it incorporates forums and private messaging to build researcher networks. There is even a group events calendar any user can update. Bookmarks can be added to Complore, as well as other custom formats like articles, master’s theses, and lectures. Anyone can tag anyone else’s items, a feature rather like Flickr’s but a bit unusual for a scholarly tool. Complore also allows users to upload files, including, but not limited to, PDFs, PowerPoint files, images, and Word documents. There is currently no limit on total storage.

In one of a string of social software upgrades, Amazon.com recently released its “Tag this product” feature. For each title, Amazon users will be able to add their own tags to books and browse other users’ tags. Tags are connected to user profiles just like Amazon book reviews.

Google Co-op, one of the latest Google products, was announced in mid-May. Google Co-op is a far more complicated flavor of tagging than any other social bookmarking tool, but it operates on a similar concept of people selecting and tagging web pages and other people using tags to find appropriate materials. Contributors (or taggers) for Google Co-op need to have a healthy knowledge of XML, but general users will see these tags pop up in general search results. So far, the most developed example is the so-called Google Health. Try a search in Google on a health topic, and you will see tags (such as Treatment, Symptoms, and Diagnosis) above the search results.

LibraryThing is a social media bookmarking web site that may just appeal to the librarian in you. It helps you catalog your books with tags and is enormously popular. In late September, it contained records for over 5.8 million books and almost eight million tags. Approximately one million records are being added per month.

Diigo is a social bookmarking and social annotation tool that’s gaining a lot of converts from other social bookmarking tools. Though there are still a few kinks (speed, for one), Diigo offers many features that may make switching from another tool worthwhile. In addition to regular social bookmarking functionality (tagging, sharing, RSS feeds, etc.), Diigo caches every page you bookmark for full-text searching, allows for “sticky note” annotations and highlighting on any web page, and has searching capabilities via its toolbar rivaling Simpy’s: and/or/not, full-text search, comments search, highlighted search, and more.

Social reference services offer the best of traditional citation managers for speeding scholarship while also adding a Library 2.0 twist—tagging, groups, and collaboration. Librarians have a new weapon in their arsenal to assist patrons in finding and keeping just the right piece of information.