Saturday, February 19, 2011

CiteULike: Making Life Simpler

I've exclusively been using CiteULike to keep my bibliography straight, for almost four years now. If I had to make an ordered list of the most important web utilities (to me), it would probably float near the top.

It really has simplified a recurring feature of my Life.

Here is a YouTube video, which showcases some of its features.

Personally, I like it for the following reasons:
  1. you can easily add a new reference to your library
  2. you can tag, classify, and search for a paper in your library very quickly
  3. you can add personal notes to a paper
  4. you can upload a personal pdf of the paper to go with the reference
  5. you can upload an annotated pdf (multiple pdfs are allowed), for papers you keep going back to again and again
  6. you can export the citation in BiBTeX format
  7. you can share papers with your group, or collaborators
  8. you can use the "recommended papers" feature (I have not used this much)
  9. It is free
Since one can archive papers online, they can easily be accessed from anywhere, and from any machine. For me, it has completely supplanted JabRef, which is a darn good program itself.

No comments: