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.

WebCite

This week I was reading about link rot (Wikipedia) when I stumbled across a tool called WebCite for creating archives of web pages that are cited in an academic work. From their website:

WebCite® is an archiving system for webreferences (cited webpages and websites), which can be used by authors, editors, and publishers of scholarly papers and books, to ensure that cited webmaterial will remain available to readers in the future.

The canonical reference for WebCite appears to be a 2005 article in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR) entitled “Going, Going, Still There: Using the WebCite Service to Permanently Archive Cited Web Pages” by Eysenbach and Trudel. I also found a 2003 poster about the service, so it appears to have been around for a while.

WebCite is a great idea for combating link rot, although other archiving services like Spurl.net and Hanzo:web could also be used. The advantage to WebCite is that they also provide "impact statistics" on cited web pages.

I did a search for “WebCite” in Google Scholar to see if WebCite had been widely adopted since I had never seen it used before. The only articles I could find that used the system were from JMIR which I assume has a policy that enforces use of WebCite for all their articles. Here’s an example of a WebCite URL:

http://www.webcitation.org/426


I may use WebCite the next time I write an article. The only thing I’m concerned about is the long-term survival of WebCite. For several days I was unable to access their website. If their service is not entirely stable, it makes me wonder how long they’ll be around.

arcget is a little too late

Gordon Mohr from the Internet Archive told me about a program called arcget that essentially does the same thing as Warrick but only works with the Internet Archive. Aaron Swartz apparently wrote it during his Christmas break last Dec. It’s too bad he didn’t know about Warrick. That seems to be the problem in general with creating a new piece of software. How do you know if it already exists so you don't waste your time duplicating someone else's efforts? All you can do is search the Web with some carefully chosen words and see what pops up.