1. Mendeley: iTunes for your .pdfs
Why is Mendeley so cool? Because it’s like iTunes for research papers — if iTunes let you access your musical library remotely, annotate albums and share them with friends.
Mendeley’s goal is to create a giant network of socially-annotated research libraries. Its aim is fostering interaction and connection among researchers in all fields. Store your unmanageable collection of pdfs and share them with your research team. Save notes and comments, then avail them to others.
But the best feature — at least for those of us drowning in pdfs — is the possibility to organize digital docs by topic, or according to the different articles you’re writing. By making comments and research notes available along with research article metadata and citations, this tool will bring joy to the lives of many researchers — that is, once all the social features are up and running (it’s still a relatively new service).
Finally, Mendeley replicates aspects of web-based reference managers: by extracting, storing and exporting references from the library, it allows users to quickly create formatted bibliographies. But it’s more complimentary to these services than competitive; you can import and export citations, for example, between Mendeley and CiteUlike and Zotero.
Sadly, like iTunes, it can’t extract data from everything you drop on. A recent test found this reviewer manually editing reference information for 00034bdg.pdf. It should be especially helpful for teaching and collaborative paper writing, since it allows a team of researchers to share references and store them in a commonly accessed collection.
-Milan Stankovic, PhD@hypios
2. CiteULike: Spreading the Bibliographic Metadata
Unless keeping track of citations with index cards is your thing, you’re probably using either a web-based citation manager (Connotea, CiteUlike, Zotero) or the popular but costly EndNote. Whatever you’re using, here’s probably what you want to be able to do: extract and export citational data from any web-based document (blog post, JSTOR article) as easily as you can retweet or Digg. Then you want to be able to access citations (wherever you are) to whip-up a perfectly formatted bibliography in the time it takes to put together a playlist.
CiteUlike is advancing the cause by working to make bibliographic data more accessible. Since most academic resources are subscription-only, not having online access effectively cuts you off from some share of bibliographic data (though searching with Google Scholar usually gets me to a page where exporting the citation is an option). In fact, the issue with citation seems to be less access than the lack of any bibliographic metadata for the vast majority of internet pages. This means that most blogs, articles, wikis and comments can’t provide any citational data at all.
Given the increasing role of web-based research, keeping track of web-based citational data will become key. To this end, CiteULike is working (with the COinS project) to embed bibliographical metadata in each html page. They also keep track of the various URL schemes research consortia use to access subscription databases, helping to get bibliographic data to the poor suckers who don’t have institutional access. Like Connotea (another good reference manager), CiteULike is social, so you can send links, get automated recommendations and cozy up to fellow sufferers researchers by sending them a suggestion (and a wink).
–Kristen Koch, Communications
3. a.aaaarg.org: Sourcing your Radical Theory
For those awaiting their weekly dose of internet irony, here goes Verso Press, which self-identifies as the largest radical publishing house, publisher of the Radical thinker series (and by radical they mean the leftist-leaning, the property-rights questioning variety), was found posting a take-down request on a popular site for pirated pdfs. Turns out they wanted to be paid for those texts being made freely available to the site’s members.
Sure, the legality of http://a.aaaarg.org is dubious. Rather, it’s obviously, indisputably illegal, but like a Prohibition-era speakeasy, you’re tempted to say: is what they’re doing really so wrong? Whoever’s responsible for a.aaaarg.org has assembled a vast (and growing) database of philosophy and critical theory texts: contemporary and ancient, analytic and continental, scientific and religious, public domain and private. Personally, I’d rather read the placemat at Burger King than a scan of an entire book, but it’s useful for a quick reference or a postprandial dose of theory. (Why can’t all philosophy be as concise as Gettier?)
Not every author is familiar (which I ascribe both to my dilettantism and my suspicion that some users upload their own dissertations for the thrill of seeing their names indexed between Hegel and Husserl), but it’s comprehensive enough to be the first place I check after Google. Plus, if they don’t have what you’re looking for: you can request it! Finally, they list Johannes de Silentio as the author of Fear and Trembling. If you’re theory-geeky enough to get why that’s incredibly theory-geeky, you probably already have an account.
Concluding Unscientific Postscript: Verso Books’ take-down request was honored, but judging by commentary on the site, its reputation wasn’t so lucky.
Greg Hermann, Deputy CEO
4. Math Overflow: It’s Not for your Math Homework
Think of it as a place where people can ask and answer research-level math questions. We stumbled upon it while researching our recent post on the incredible success of polymath1. The most elegant aspect of the site is its reputation-building model. Points are garnered for most question-related ativities, winning you priviledge-granting badges that establish the moderating hierarchy on the site.
There’s an excellent discussion on their FAQ section about what kinds of questions to pose on the site (i.e. well-defined questions that admit of an answer). Open questions in mathematics, like those tackled by polymath projects (or outlined in the Clay Insititute Millenium Prizes) are not good bets, but you can always ask a specific question about these types of puzzles (i.e. does the particular approach proposed by J.R. Field Medal work under these conditions?).
The primary mechanism for bringing useful insights to the fore is voting up/down user comments. It’s run on Stack Exchange, the software developed for Stackoverflow, the pioneering Q&A site for computer programmers. FAQs don’t mention guidelines for crediting contributions on the site, but maybe they can pose that as a question and help advance the citation norms for online problem solving. =P
Coolest feature: If you pose a hard or obscure question, or one that just hasn’t gotten a lot of bite, you can offer a bounty on it (i.e. offer some of your reputation points to a solver to sweeten the deal and encourage participation).
Honorable mention: Stackoverflow. It seems that much of the inspiration with respect to collaborative problem-solving comes from computer programming, and the success they’ve already achieved with what Nielsen has called “conscious modularity.”
Debbie Goldgaber, Deputy Communications Officer
5. Faviki: falling for semantic tagging all over again.
It’s quite simply the most intelligent social bookmarking system today: think del.icio.us, but way smarter. You can tag documents with structured info (like in Wikipedia), meaning tags are concrete and linked to specific concepts. This makes searching, finding, recommending and suggesting achieve remarkable levels of precision (what you always wanted from your social bookmarking, right?).
Since its previous run of updates, you can also “manually” link certain tags with others, so if you like to search for articles about Apples, but you mean the food source rich in vitamin A and C and not the company, you can specify it. Similiarly, if you tag the player Zenadine Zidane with his nickname Zizou, faviki will ask what exactly you mean by that. You create the connections, then Faviki remembers it.
Finally, if it can’t find your tag in wikipedia, it will search the web for pages that fit that tag, asking you, the user, whether it matches. It learns with you and other users of Faviki (how social is that!). Best of all, your work on del.i.cious is not lost (a worry for many otherwise enthusiastic users): import all your bookmarks, and just convert the tags. (No word yet on how arduous the “conversion” process is though.)
In research, conceptual specificity is indispensible, and so is faviki.
Angela Natividad, VP, Marketing
Tags: aaaarg.org, Best of, citulike, collaborative post, faviki, five4five, hypios team, mathoverflow, Mendeley, tools
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