CiteULike - a second brain for researchers

Today I discovered a new free tool for researchers to manage their references. It’s called CiteULike, and it’s been around since 2004. Richard Cameron created the site and intends to keep it free.

I was able to upload all my BibTeX entries without any difficulties. I can now tag each entry so I can quickly see what papers are relevant to a particular subject. For example, here are all the papers I have tagged for web-archiving:

http://www.citeulike.org/user/fmccown/tag/web-archiving

CiteULike is useful for finding out about new research in your area. For example, this user apparently has many of the same interests as me, and I found several new papers by browsing his library:

http://www.citeulike.org/user/ChaTo/

It’s cool because I can even see comments that users have made about specific papers.

Now when I come across a new paper, I can add it to my CiteULike library and jot a quick note about it and not worry months later when I need to find the paper. And now instead of emailing Michael my BibTeX file, he can download the whole thing directly from the Web.