organizing your references (i heart citeulike.com)

My move to my current undisclosed location has been taking place one carload at a time. Just before the car was loaded up for the first time, I was telling a friend that the first carload would carry several of the boxes containing my collection of references. "There are about 700 articles in those boxes, and who knows if I'll ever even need them again," I told him. To my surprise, his eyes lit up. "How are they organized?" he wondered. At first I thought he was humoring me, just carrying on conversation. It takes a true geek to want to talk about the pros and cons of different reference organization systems, but a true geek he is. So there we sat, chatting over milkshakes about my references.

Keeping your references organized is a bit like being on a stairmaster: you can keep climbing, but you're never going to get to the top. The way I see it, there are a few major challenges here:

1. Taking the time to put a system into place and stick to it. It's relatively easy to alphabetize your references, but is that any good if you can't remember authors' names? Or if you tend to accumulate piles of papers on your desk that you then don't have time to file away?

2. Being able to find a particular reference once it's filed neatly away. I've never met a scientists who is completely happy with his or her organization system, and most of them admit that it's often faster to find the article again online and print out a new copy.

3. Unread vs. read articles. For me, filing away unread articles means that I'm never going to read them.

4. Digital vs. hard copies. I still can't fully digest papers that I'm reading on a computer screen, and I print a lot of papers out that I never read. As the stacks of unread papers grow, so does my liberal enviroguilt.

Half my references are currently filed alphabetically, and half are by topic. I've lost track of which ones I've read and not read and which onces have been entered into BibTeX. Things are complicated by the fact that, in my new position, I need to be reading articles on a wider range of topics but in less depth. So my current system is useless.

Enter CiteUlike, a free, online system for your references. After signing up (which takes 5 seconds), here's how it works:

1. Enter the URL of the article you want to add to your reference library. CiteULike parses the information on that page, pulls out the title, authors, journal, even the abstract (!) and creates an entry in your library.

2. Add tags. This is the feature that makes the site powerful. Let's say you're adding an article on The effect of ancient population bottlenecks on human phenotypic variation. In my old, topical file system, this might fall into the bottlenecks folder or maybe the phenotypes folder or maybe the evolution folder. The power of tagging is that I can add the tags "bottlenecks," "phenotypes," and "evolution" to this paper and then search for it later using those categories.

3. Rank your reading priorities. Some papers, I'll never read, and I know it. Others I want to read ASAP. CiteULike gives you five options from "Top Priority" to "I don't really want to read it."

4. Upload a personal pdf of the article, if you want to.

5. See who else has that article in their library. Unlike most social networking sites ("We both love soup...and snow peas..."), this actually seems useful because I can get a glimpse into the libraries of other people who are reading the same articles I am. In other words, I might actually learn something.

6. Export references to EndNote or BibTeX.

So CiteULike addresses a lot of the challenges of developing and maintaining a functional a reference system.

On the eve of new organization projects, I always feel a bit giddy. I don't have any interest in entering all of my old references into CiteULike, though they do have an experimental 'Import from BibTeX feature.' For me, the real value here is going to be organizing new references, many of which I only need to read at the abstract level.

If you're into this idea, Connotea is also worth checking out. It looks a bit slicker than CiteULike, and has the benefit of having an "Add to Connotea" button that you can stick on your browser that makes adding references super-easy. I'm a bit turned off by Connotea's 'Recently Used Tags,' though, which include Britney Spears and Pamela Anderson. CiteULike's users look like straight-up geeks who wouldn't mix their Britney clippings with their articles on Boltzmann brains.