Web(2.0)sites for researchers – Part 1 – Social Bookmarking

In these 2 posts, I’ll give a summary of some useful websites for researchers, and how they can help you to manage information, and network with colleagues around the world.

Social Bookmarking

Most people are familiar with using their internet browser bookmarks to store links to websites. With social bookmarking services, you can store your bookmarks on the web – and access them from any computer. You can share your sites, see who has bookmarked the same pages as you - and look at what else they have bookmarked. Most social bookmark services use folksonomies – which means you can create your own tags to categorise your bookmarks. Frequently used services include Del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon.

There are also social bookmarking services designed specifically for scholarly research. Citeulike allows you to save references to journal articles, books etc that you find on the web. It works with most publisher websites (e.g. PubMed, ScienceDirect, Ingenta) and extracts the information from the web page (title, authors, page numbers, etc) into a bibliographic citation. This makes it easy to export your references to bibliographic software packages like Endnote. Citeulike also has a group function – you can join a group to see what papers are being posted on a particular topic - or create a group for your academic department to keep track of what every-one is reading.

2Collab was launched by Elsevier in 2007 and allows you to bookmark websites and scholarly papers, all in one place. Like Citeulike, you can join or create groups and share bookmarks among members. 2Collab users can also create a profile to list research interests and publications. If you are an author, you can automatically add papers from Scopus using your Author ID.

If you like the sound of sharing references with colleagues, but want more privacy, EndnoteWeb allows you to organise your references into groups, and share them with invited colleagues.