sardonick

Richard Cameron’s brainchild CiteULike is a social software driven, web-based content management system for academic papers. It’s a lot like del.icio.us (socially-browsable, public bookmarks, organized by tags and folksonomy rather than by strict hierarchy), but with more support for the metadata typical to academic papers.

It also imports and exports to bibtex, for low barrier-to-entry.

I’ve known about CiteULike for a while now, but somehow never got around to using it. Paper-reading is too-often a chore (I’d all-too-often rather be coding!), and entering in metadata and tracking is not the sexiest of tasks. Well, an impending self-imposed deadline for a journal submission made me realize “uh oh, need a literature survey!”, combined with “well, I’ve surveyed a lot, but it’s all buried in a (literally!) two-foot stack of printed-out journal and conference papers, hilited and with notes in the margins”. So, in a bout structured procrastination last Friday, I got around to picking out the most succulent of the papers and entered them into my citeulike page.

My first impressions:

1. The social aspect of it has a lot of promise. It’ll be great to see other users who read the same papers I do, or use a categorization tagset that overlaps with mine. The only problem is that not too many NLP (much less pedagogy, second language acquisition, or even linguistics) people use it. This kind of social software has usefulness roughly proportional to the square of its users. I’m still a little skeptical that the userbase will ever grow to make the system as useful as del.icio.us–academics are a small subsection of society, the pieslice of academics with research areas overlapping with mine is miniscule indeed, and the forkful of those that discover citeulike? I suspect I might finish dinner still hungry.
2. That said, the personal content management aspect of citeulike is a win. That was what was so good for del.icio.us: it works in the social-software arena, but it’s useful from an anti-social arena as well (I know people who use it just to store their bookmarks from a web-accessible location, tag for their own future lookup, and don’t really care that other people are bookmarking what they bookmark). I’ve always had trouble tracking and documenting my reading binges, and maintaining an up-to-date bibtex file of everything I consume/produce. This system looks like it can solve that.
3. Use of paper metadata remains unexploited. Let me browse “Other papers that were published at this conference”, “Order-by-publish-date”, “Order-by-last-read-date”. And citations and references inside the papers themselves forms a rich web of data that I’m sure can be mined for reading-recommendation-goodness.
4. The social aspect remains unexploited. Yes, Richard is probably lacking both data and CPU cycles, but I can’t wait to see “people who bookmarked the same things you did have rated these other papers very highly, that you haven’t read yet”
5. I’ve always had a problem of following journals, and this (along with Google Scholar) has helped a lot. The RSS-viewable watchlists, and the searchability is really, really handy (speaking of which, what about some more integration with google scholar?).

Update: More thoughts:

1. Let me rank papers that I have read, perhaps with criteria similar to those used by paper-reviewers for conferences
2. Tag intersection, union, difference. These are the tools that make a tag-based organizational system as powerful as (or even more powerful than) your traditional strict hierarchy system. Why don’t more folksonomic systems implement these? They’re not that much more expensive, computationally.

Yes, I know the requested feature list grows and grows, and I realize that citeulike is just a side project for Richard… alas…