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CiteULike is a free service to help you to store, organise and share the scholarly papers you are reading. When you see a paper on the web that interests you, you can click one button and have it added to your personal library. CiteULike automatically extracts the citation details, so there's no need to type them in yourself. It all works from within your web browser so there's no need to install any software. Because your library is stored on the server, you can access it from any computer with an Internet connection.
You can share your library with others, and find out who is reading the same papers as you. In turn, this can help you discover literature which is relevant to your field but you may not have known about. The more people who use CiteULike, and the more they use it, the better it becomes as a resource. You can help with this process just by using CiteULike and through the invite a friend feature.
CiteULike has a flexible filing system based on tags. You can choose whichever tags you want, and apply as many as you like to a paper. You can use tags to group papers together.
Yes. Create a BibTeX file containing your references and then import it into CiteULike by using the "Import" link at the top of your "Library" tab.
You can use the "Export" link at the top of your "Library" tab to export your library in either BibTeX or RIS format then use BibTeX or EndNote (or whichever reference manager you prefer) to build it in to your bibliography.
The system currently supports: ACL Anthology, AIP Scitation, Amazon, American Chem. Soc. Publications, American Geophysical Union, American Meteorological Society Journals, Annual Reviews, Anthrosource, arXiv.org e-Print archive, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) portal, BioMed Central, Blackwell Synergy, BMJ, Cambridge University Press, CiteSeer, Cryptology ePrint Archive, DBLP, EdITLib, Education Resources Information Center, HighWire, IEEE Explore, informaworld, Ingenta, IngentaConnect, IoP Electronic Journals, IUCr, IWA Publishing Online, Journal of Machine Learning Research, JSTOR, Mary Ann Liebert, MathSciNet, MetaPress, NASA Astrophysics Data System, National Bureau of Economic Research, Nature, Open Repository, Optical Society of America, Physical Review Online Archive, PLoS, PLoS Biology, Project MUSE, PsyCONTENT, PubMed, PubMed Central, Royal Society, Science, ScienceDirect, Scopus, Social Science Research Network, SpringerLink, Usenix, Wiley InterScience, but you can post any other article from any non-supported site on the web - you'll just have to type the citation details in yourself.
Groups are collections of users creating shared libraries of links. They are useful for keeping track of a particular topic or what everyone else in a lab, class or academic department is reading. You can start your own groups and join existing groups.
Richard Cameron wrote CiteULike in November 2004 and ran the service privately. In December 2006 Richard teamed up with Chris Hall, Kevin Emamy and James Caddy to set up Oversity Ltd. to further develop and support CiteULike. Our address is CiteULike, 500 Chiswick High Road, London W4 5RG, UK.
CiteULike is hosted in a professional datacentre and the database is backed up every night.
In a recent interview Richard Cameron said:
The reason I wrote the site was, after recently coming back to academia, I was slightly shocked by the quality of some of the tools available to help academics do their job. I found it preferable to start writing proper tools for my own use than to use existing software.
Collecting material for a bibliography is something which appeared to require an amazing amount of drudgery. All the existing options seemed to require more effort than strictly necessary to transfer the citation details for the article currently open in my web browser into some sort of permanent storage. I'm sure with a lot of practice I could have got the process down to twenty seconds or so, but that twenty seconds just presented enough unpleasantness of flipping between browsers and external applications, copying and pasting details, and opening downloaded "citation export" files that I was far less likely to actually do it. I'd need amazing amounts of self discipline to consistently bookmark everything I ever read on the off-chance that I might want it again. Unless, of course, it just involved clicking a button on the browser and having it all magically happen.
So, the obvious idea was that if I use a web browser to read articles, the most convenient way of storing them is by using a web browser too. This becomes even more interesting when you consider the process of jointly authoring a paper. There is a point where all the authors need to get together and get all the articles they wish to cite into the one place. If you do this process collaboratively on a web site, then it's easier.
The next obvious leap is that if all the references are available via a web interface on a central server, it would be really nice to see what your colleagues are reading and be able to show them what you're reading. It cuts down on the number of emails saying "have you seen this article?"
In fact, if enough users register on the system, you'll probably find people reading the same articles as you. That provides a great way of keeping on top of the literature - you simply share it with people who have common interests.
If we have a model of everyone's library being completely open, then our reference manager has suddenly transformed itself into a piece of social software. That's what CiteULike aims to be.
There were a number of social bookmark managers which existed before CiteULike (del.icio.us, unalog, etc), but they were all general systems designed to handle arbitrary web links. They didn't really capture all the metadata (authors, journal name, ...) which go with academic articles. Also, the way some publishers operate makes it quite difficult to actually get a stable URL to bookmark, you need to do a bit of processing on it first.
So, I wrote CiteULike. It's grown a little bit since then, and the plan is to keep developing it and making it better.
You're quite welcome to post anything you like, including arbitrary web sites (but read the restriction below about non peer-reviewed articles not being as prominently displayed). You could, if you wanted, use CiteULike to keep track of your browser's bookmarks. It is, however, a tool specifically designed to work with academic papers, so if you just want just use it as a bookmark manager, you might be better off using another service like del.icio.us. We do not allow CiteULike to be used for SPAM - we will delete SPAM where we find it.
Nothing's wrong. If you posted a paper from a site that's not on the "supported" list, then it will appear in your library, but it won't be widely publicised on CiteULike (so it won't appear on the front page, and it won't appear in the "all papers for tag..." links). Of course, if you post a paper from one of our recognised journals, we know that the paper has already been peer-reviewed, and it will go on the front page.
This is hopefully an effective measure against both spam, and lunatics trying to peddle their crazy ideas about the origins of the universe.
The spam issue is obvious. If spammers worked out how to post links to the sites they're trying to advertise (and spammers are sometimes quite clever, if a little evil) and clutter up CiteULike with this junk then they'd obviously do it, and this site would be a worse place for it. Also, because we allow search engines onto CiteULike, the spammers might think that having lots of links to their site might boost their rankings in the Google search results. Actually, that wouldn't work because of a feature on Google... but they might not know that and try it anyway.
The "lunatics" problem is a bit more subtle. We regularly get emails from people who have posted articles (which clearly haven't been peer-reviewed) wanting to know what they can do to promote their work on CiteULike. The short answer is: nothing. These papers are generally either fairly curious ideas about the Big Bang, or results of less-than-scrupulous clinical trials of a drug (which is presumably manufactured by a company the user has shares in). CiteULike is not a place to try to push your own work to a larger audience (although, of course, you're welcome to submit your own articles and, if they're any good, others will bookmark them). This policy has the unfortunate side effect that some genuinely good articles might not be as visible as they might be. Hopefully this should slowly become less of an issue as as the number of supported journals increases.
This is a known problem, and one which is proving to be quite a pain. It all stems from the way PubMed deals with the case when there's precisely one result for the search term you type in. Normally you'd type in your phrase, get a list of possible results, and then click one to get the the article summary page. Under those conditions, you'll notice that you get a page with a URL which contains enough information to work out which article you're looking at. On the other hand, when there's only one result which matches your search term, you'll find that the URL doesn't give you this information. In other words, it's not possible to bookmark that page. Consequently, CiteULike gets quite confused and can't work out which article to bookmark. It's something we're going to fix, but it requires quite a radical re-think of how the bookmarklet works. In the meantime the (ugly) workaround is: 1) Click the "related articles" button on pubmed. 2) Find your article again (it's usually the top hit). 3) Try posting it again to CiteULike.
Simply add the following javascript to your page:
Right. Ezproxy seem to be doing a roaring trade supplying universities with their own custom URL scheme for ACM/JSTOR/ScienceDirect/etc, so, depending on your particular institution, you might find you need to add something like libezproxy.syr.edu/login?url= to the front of some of our article links to make them actually work.
Variety being the spice of life, all universities have their own different URLs, and we don't have a table of all of them in my database which is why we can't form anything other than the "canonical" URLs at the moment.
So, we can either build that table and functionality (not too hard) and start getting users to submit general rules about how their university form the proxies links (probably more difficult as there are a lot of universities in the world). Or, we can find a cleverer way of doing it...
...which may well come out of Dan Chudnov's COinS work.
This is the more librarian friendly way of doing things, which says that a particular university should be able to decide what the appropriate version of the PDF should be (the one it has a subscription to), and not some external service like CiteULike. The idea is that you:
There is also a Greasemonkey script (availabe from the same place), if you prefer.
We can't promise it will infallibly work with every article and your particular university, but it's got a lot of promise and definitely represents the "right" way of doing it. We are quite keen to give this a fair shot and not resort to writing fairly unmaintainable tables of universities on our side.
For German-speaking users, there is a wiki-based tutorial available here [http://moodle.donau-uni.ac.at]. It was created by a postgraduate student at Donau-Universität Krems.
Yes. Probably the most useful thing you could do at the moment is write a "plugin" to let CiteULike work with a currently unsupported publisher's site. Do you post articles from a site which the system doesn't know how to extract the details from (you have to type them in yourself)? Do you know a little programming? If so, you might like to check out the plugin subversion repository and the documentation. If you've got subversion installed, you can check out the source code to your hard drive by saying
svn co http://svn.citeulike.org/svn/ citeulike
I want to know how this affects me.
We see all the public data as being a valuable academic resource for people who work in text mining. If anyone is interested in the dataset for a sensible (non-commercial) purpose then it is available for download here.
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