Electronic Highways
Web tools for organizing
and discovering research papers
There are more than 27,000 academic journals published today, according to Ulrich’s Periodicals Directory. How many of them do you read? Keeping up with the lit these days is kind of like sipping from a fire hose. If you’re like me, you have mountains of paper strewn about your office—piles of articles that at one time or another looked important enough to print out, but many of which remain unread. While most of my paper mountains are loosely organized by topic (the tallest peak is one called Mount Miscellaneous), I think it’s safe to say that sorting articles into piles is not the best way to organize a personal library. Most articles end up buried so deep in the pile that they are rendered un-findable. Making matters worse are the abundant pdfs stashed away in various folders on my hard drive.
Recently, one particularly tall pile of articles in my office, groaning under the weight of so much scholarship, yielded to the pull of gravity and toppled over, causing an avalanche of papers across my desk. As I cleaned up the mess, I stumbled upon a long-forgotten gem of an article, and while I was happy to find it—it was kind of like a finding a $10 bill in the pocket of a coat I hadn’t worn a while—it made me realize that there have to be better ways to discover and organize the important research being published in my field. And it turns out, there are a multitude of new online tools that can help manage the ever-growing mountains of research that inevitably accumulate over time.
The most promising of these new tools incorporate aspects of social bookmarking sites, social networks and bibliographic citation managers. Two popular tools are Connotea, which is sponsored by Nature, and CiteULike, sponsored by Springer. The foundation for both of these sites is bookmarking—researchers can store and keep track of online references to scholarship—journal articles, conference proceedings, working papers, book chapters, etc. But both of these sites go beyond simple, static bookmarks and offer the ability to store and search your pdfs, share your personal libraries with peers and get recommendations for articles that may be of interest based on what you have bookmarked.
Other tools focus more on social networking to help make your personal library more accessible. These are social networks not for connecting with former classmates or distant relatives, but for finding other scholars with similar research interests. Two sites getting some buzz in this arena are Mendeley and ResearchGATE. Mendeley, which boasts thousands of users and a database that includes millions of research papers, recently won an award as the technology “most likely to change the world for the better” from the Guardian. ResearchGATE, which also is growing rapidly (2,000 new members per day), allows users to store, share and identify related research. It’s worth pointing out that these tools are gaining traction not only in the hard sciences, but also in the social sciences and humanities as well, with researchers in philosophy constituting a large network on ResearchGATE.
And even the old workaday reference managers that many of us already use are starting to emulate these other sites. EndNote, which is available from the UB Libraries, and Zotero, a free open-source add-in for Firefox, are starting to incorporate new features that allow researchers to store pdfs, share their research libraries and collaborate with other researchers. There are lots of other tools out there (I’m starting to track them here) and many are still in the experimental stages of learning what works and what doesn’t. But you may be surprised at how many researchers already are using these resources—give them a try and see what the buzz is about!
—Charles Lyons, University Libraries
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