Frequently Asked Questions Everything you ever wanted to know, but hoped that someone else would ask for you.

What is CiteULike? CiteULike is a free service to help you to store, organise and share the scholarly papers you are reading. When you see a paper on the web that interests you, you can click one button and have it added to your personal library. CiteULike automatically extracts the citation details, so there's no need to type them in yourself. It all works from within your web browser so there's no need to install any software. Because your library is stored on the server, you can access it from any computer with an Internet connection. Why is it "social"? You can share your library with others, and find out who is reading the same papers as you. In turn, this can help you discover literature which is relevant to your field but you may not have known about. The more people who use CiteULike, and the more they use it, the better it becomes as a resource. You can help with this process just by using CiteULike and through the invite a friend feature. How can I organise my papers? CiteULike has a flexible filing system based on tags. You can choose whichever tags you want, and apply as many as you like to a paper. You can use tags to group papers together. Can I import my existing references into CiteULike? Yes. Create a BibTeX file containing your references and then import it into CiteULike by using the "Import" link at the top of your "Library" tab. How do I build a bibliography? You can use the "Export" link at the top of your "Library" tab to export your library in either BibTeX or RIS format then use BibTeX or EndNote (or whichever reference manager you prefer) to build it in to your bibliography. What sources of papers are supported? The system currently supports: ACL Anthology, AIP Scitation, AIS Electronic Library, AMS Journals, Amazon, American Chem. Soc. Publications, American Geophysical Union, American Meteorological Society Journals, American Physical Society, American Physical Society, American Society for Clinical Investigation, Annual Reviews, Anthrosource, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) portal, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Digital Library, BMJ, BioMed Central, BioOne, BiomedExperts, Blackwell Synergy, Cambridge University Press, Cases Network, Cell, Chicago Journals, CiNii, CiteSeer, CiteSeerX Beta, Cryptology ePrint Archive, DBLP, Daum, EBI CiteXplore, EGU Journals, EdITLib Digitial Library, Education Resources Information Center, Elsevier, F1000, First Monday, Game Studies, HighWire, IEEE Digital Library, IEEE Explore, IOS Press, IUCr, IWA Publishing Online, Informa Healthcare, Ingenta, IngentaConnect, International Journal of Communication, International Journal of Digital Curation, IoP Electronic Journals, JASA, JSTAGE, JSTOR, JStatSoft, Japan Society of Applied Physics, Journal of Machine Learning Research, Journal of Usability Studies, Journal of Visualized Experiment, Journal of the American Medical Association, Journal of the American Medical Association, Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, LibraryThing, MIT Press Journals, Mary Ann Liebert, MathSciNet, MetaPress, Morgan and Claypool, NASA Astrophysics Data System, NRC Research Press, National Bureau of Economic Research, Nature, Nature Precedings, New England Journal of Medicine, New SpringerLink, Open Repository, Optical Society of America, PLoS Biology, PenSoft, Pion, Primary Care Respiratory Journal, Project MUSE, PsyCONTENT, PubMed, PubMed Central, Queen's University OJS, Requests for Comments and Internet-Drafts, Royal Society, Royal Society of Chemistry, SPIE Digitial Library, Science, ScienceDirect, Social Science Research Network, Society of Exploration Geophysicists , Springer Protocols, SpringerLink, St Andrews Library Journals, Taylor and Francis, UK PubMed Central, University of Texas at Austin AI Lab Website, Usenix, Wiley InterScience, World Scientific, WorldCat, WormBase, arXiv.org e-Print archive, crossref-doi, datadryad, de Gruyter, eLife, figshare, frontiers, informaworld, mdpi, novo|seek, peerj, peerjpreprints, plos, scientificdata, zenodo, but you can post any other article from any non-supported site on the web - you'll just have to type the citation details in yourself. What are "groups"? Groups are collections of users creating shared libraries of links. They are useful for keeping track of a particular topic or what everyone else in a lab, class or academic department is reading. You can startyour own groups and join existing groups. Who is behind CiteULike? Richard Cameron wrote CiteULike in November 2004 and ran the service privately. In December 2006 Richard teamed up with Chris Hall, Kevin Emamy and James Caddy to set up Oversity Ltd. to further develop and support CiteULike. Our registered address is CiteULike, Redland House, 157 Redland Road. Bristol BS6 6YE UK. Why write CiteULike? In a recent interview Richard Cameron said: The reason I wrote the site was, after recently coming back to academia, I was slightly shocked by the quality of some of the tools available to help academics do their job. I found it preferable to start writing proper tools for my own use than to use existing software. Collecting material for a bibliography is something which appeared to require an amazing amount of drudgery. All the existing options seemed to require more effort than strictly necessary to transfer the citation details for the article currently open in my web browser into some sort of permanent storage. I'm sure with a lot of practice I could have got the process down to twenty seconds or so, but that twenty seconds just presented enough unpleasantness of flipping between browsers and external applications, copying and pasting details, and opening downloaded "citation export" files that I was far less likely to actually do it. I'd need amazing amounts of self discipline to consistently bookmark everything I ever read on the off-chance that I might want it again. Unless, of course, it just involved clicking a button on the browser and having it all magically happen. So, the obvious idea was that if I use a web browser to read articles, the most convenient way of storing them is by using a web browser too. This becomes even more interesting when you consider the process of jointly authoring a paper. There is a point where all the authors need to get together and get all the articles they wish to cite into the one place. If you do this process collaboratively on a web site, then it's easier. The next obvious leap is that if all the references are available via a web interface on a central server, it would be really nice to see what your colleagues are reading and be able to show them what you're reading. It cuts down on the number of emails saying "have you seen this article?" In fact, if enough users register on the system, you'll probably find people reading the same articles as you. That provides a great way of keeping on top of the literature - you simply share it with people who have common interests. If we have a model of everyone's library being completely open, then our reference manager has suddenly transformed itself into a piece of social software. That's what CiteULike aims to be. There were a number of social bookmark managers which existed before CiteULike (del.icio.us, unalog, etc), but they were all general systems designed to handle arbitrary web links. They didn't really capture all the metadata (authors, journal name, ...) which go with academic articles. Also, the way some publishers operate makes it quite difficult to actually get a stable URL to bookmark, you need to do a bit of processing on it first. So, I wrote CiteULike. It's grown a little bit since then, and the plan is to keep developing it and making it better. The links to ACM etc are great but of course to actually get the articles I, at least, have to go via the library proxy server when I'm off campus. Right. Ezproxy seem to be doing a roaring trade supplying universities with their own custom URL scheme for ACM/JSTOR/ScienceDirect/etc, so, depending on your particular institution, you might find you need to add something like libezproxy.syr.edu/login?url= to the front of some of our article links to make them actually work. Variety being the spice of life, all universities have their own different URLs, and we don't have a table of all of them in my database which is why we can't form anything other than the "canonical" URLs at the moment. So, we can either build that table and functionality (not too hard) and start getting users to submit general rules about how their university form the proxies links (probably more difficult as there are a lot of universities in the world). Or, we can find a cleverer way of doing it...... which may well come out of Dan Chudnov's COinS work. This is the more librarian friendly way of doing things, which says that a particular university should be able to decide what the appropriate version of the PDF should be (the one it has a subscription to), and not some external service like CiteULike. The idea is that you:

Grab a bookmarklet from here Navigate to an article (or list of articles) on CiteULike and hit the autoresolver bookmarklet. There is also a Greasemonkey script (availabe from the same place), if you prefer. We can't promise it will infallibly work with every article and your particular university, but it's got a lot of promise and definitely represents the "right" way of doing it. We are quite keen to give this a fair shot and not resort to writing fairly unmaintainable tables of universities on our side.