scientific article filtering

January 19, 2007 at 8:27 am | | everyday science, news, science community, software, wild web

The wave of social bookmarking is finally reaching scientific journal articles. What YouTube, de.licio.us, and digg are to stupid videos and strange websites, now biowizard, CiteULike, and BioInfoBank are to scientific articles. (See also my previous post about CiteULike.) I suspect Connotea, with some social features already existing, is on its way to more filtering of scientific articles, too.

I welcome this progress. I find it pretty tedious reading journal tables of contents every day/week, which is necessary to keep up with new ideas that you hadn’t thought of (and thus are hard to search for in a database). Also, with journals such as PLoS One (which publishes anything—whether it’s interesting or not), filtering of journal articles will become more and more useful to pinpoint only articles you’re interested in reading.

The ranking mechanism of these science social bookmarking sites is far from perfect. But it’s a good start. Go check them out and make it easier for me to find papers I want to read!

[Note: My favorite site is still CiteULike. Connotea is nice and probably less buggy, but it seems to progress at a much slower rate, probably because CUL programming is open-source and collaborative. I can’t imagine biowizard really being that helpful in the long run, because it doesn’t have any of the functionality of CUL or Connotea and only applies to biology. I’m going to stick with CUL until someone else wins unequivocally (then I’ll export my library). I’ll update you as things change.]

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