When work­ing with aca­d­e­mic papers, you encounter the same old prob­lems every­body has with dig­i­tal data orga­ni­za­tion: cat­e­go­rize by author, date, topic, method or jour­nal? Addi­tion­ally, you have to keep track of the ref­er­ences for cita­tion. So I decided to try out one of the new pub­lic book­mark­ing tools for aca­d­e­mic research: citeu­like and con­notea.

They both seemed pretty fre­quented and offer roughly the same tools like stor­ing paper ref­er­ences online, tag­ging, groups, topic sub­scrip­tions, social fea­tures (who has read this paper) etc. One great ben­e­fit of these tools is that you can use them to dis­cover papers, store them and later, when cit­ing them, just export your book­marks and you have all the meta­data you need for proper cita­tion in bib­tex for­mat. So no more copy-and-paste of authors, title, years etc. This is done once for each paper by the first user to cite the paper and the rest of the com­mu­nity ben­e­fits from the effort. The sec­ond great ben­e­fit is the social fac­tor: once you dis­cover a user with a sim­i­lar inter­est pro­file as yours, brows­ing his list of book­marked papers is great joy because you find lots of valu­able resources for your research topic you might not have found otherwise.

So which of the ser­vices did I choose? From a first impres­sion, con­notea seemed more well-designed, mature and clean.

But, this doesn’t mean too much nowa­days. So first, I checked the pop­u­lar­ity of the sites. These are the sta­tis­tics from alexa.com:

Wow — this seems to be quite a tight race. No clear win­ner here.

Then I wanted to see, which of the tools are more talked about in the blo­gos­phere using blogpulse.com:

Clearly, a tie again.

Hm.

The final deci­sion how­ever, was very easy, when I looked at the tag clouds of the two ser­vices. Con­notea first:

Clearly, the bulk of users are med­ical stu­dents, bioin­for­mat­ics, biol­ogy, some com­puter scientists.

Con­trar­ily, citeulike’s tags:

A bunch of geeks — that’s my boys! I signed up immediately.

I found it very inter­est­ing that, in the end, a rough overview over the com­mu­nity struc­ture gave the feel­ing I was at the right spot — a much more impor­tant cri­te­rion than a fea­ture com­par­i­son, access sta­tis­tics or the visual design.

And here‘s my account:http://www.citeulike.org/user/MoritzStefaner