Tuesday, July 11, 2006

Shared bookmarks for the literature -- what to do?

After some initial skepticism, I agree that "social bookmarking" is nice. It's very useful to put bookmarks to the literature online and see what articles others have cited, and the old approach of journal-specific browsing (associated with hard-copy volumes, but also including eTOCs) is certainly outmoded. I'm experimenting now with del.icio.us (as both ongenetics and RNAinfo) and Connotea. An RNA Society survey generated a few votes for CiteUlike, which looks great, although it is not easy to get it to accept an article from PubMed (in order to get the correct URL active you have to select the article you want from a list; if it is only result of your search, PubMed continues to display the URL for the search). A user named Cortel has lots of relevant citations, so I may continue to keep track of him, whether I settle on CiteUlike or not. I also created my parallel blog, "Quick Notes on Genetics," primarily with the idea of citing articles, and I keep a list of especially relevant articles tied to my lab's web page (the Mount lab reading room). Finally, it's worth mentioning the Faculty of 1000 in this context. This is all way too much. It's not clear what I will settle on, but most of these will be forgotten once I stop exploring and develop a routine for finding and sharing the articles that interest me.