CiteULike helps you find papers!!!

As a graduate student, you are expected to read tons of research papers, journal articles and other articles related to your course work and research principles. Many a times, it is up to the student to search for these articles, and verify their authenticity. Many times we find PDF files online that talk about the exact same topic that you have been searching for, but then when u look to verify its authenticity - NO CLUE!!! Usually conferences websites and publication houses and websites like Citeseer and IEEE Explore will help you to identify the source. But then all this is a lot of hard work, and takes time.

CiteULike hopes to ease some of this pain and attempt to help you organize your reading material in a way that will help you locate new stuff, without having to worry about the veracity of the source of the article.

The premise is simple. Quoting Wikipedia:
“CiteULike is based on the principle of social bookmarking and is aimed to promote and to develop the sharing of scientific references amongst researchers. In the same way that it is possible to catalog web pages (with Furl and

del.icio.us) or photographs (with Flickr), scientists can share information on academic papers with specific tools developed for that purpose.”

You sign up with the service and start adding your articles, papers and other journal references into your ‘library’. Every addition requires you to provide corresponding tags. These tags and other metadata can then be used to link up your library articles with ones that others have been reading.

CiteULike gives access to personal or shared bibliographies directly from the web. It allows one to see what other people posted publicly, which tags they added, and how they commented and rated a paper. It is also possible to browse the public libraries of people with similar interest to discover interesting papers. Groups allow individual users to collaborate with other users to build a library of references. The data are backed up daily from the central server.

The author of this CiteULike is a scientist himself (Richard Cameron, London) who found it very cumbersome to author bibliographies, and in his experiments with the then available bibliography software, he found them to be highly inadequate.

The source code for this project is closed source, but the repository of metadata they collect is available for free download. Plug-ins for this project can be downloaded using Subversion.

Does it work?
So the bottom line is, CiteULike will help me discover related literature from multiple sources, and will also tell me if those articles are actually being used by someone or not, and if they are any good.
Time to put it to the test! I signed up with the service, and fed into the library references to some of the research papers that we have been studying in the PRS class.

Once I had my library up, I then looked to see if other people are actually reading any of the stuff we have been in our class. Turns out there are quite a few people do read/research in recommender systems!!!! I found a handful of groups and people who are interested in the papers that I have in my library.

To conclude, CiteULike is a simple tool with a very simple interface that helps one build up a library of literature which they can then link up with other public media to find stuff that matches their interests. The concept of using meta data to link thing up is not new, using it to solve the problem of composing bibliographies and find interesting (and reliable) research articles is a innovative concept. In fact I might actually use this a lot in the coming few weeks for some of my course work and individual research work!!!


Links:
CiteULike
Wikipedia talks more on CiteULike