Thing 17 CiteULike

CiteULike is a reference manager.   

What is a reference manager and why is it useful?

Reference management software, citation management software or personal bibliographic management software is software for students, teachers and authors to use for recording and utilising bibliographic references. Once a citation has been recorded, it can be used time and again in generating bibliographies, such as lists of references in scholarly books, articles,essays and reading lists.
Citations can be published in a variety of formats eg Harvard, APA, Vancouver, so that you can reproduce them in the format required by a University or publisher when handing in an essay or submitting an article  for publication.

Some expensive commercial reference packages such as Endnote or RefWorks, are often available free through universities and colleges. They both offer 30-day free trials to the wider public. However if you have no connections with an academic institution or need something more permanent a free online reference manager like CiteULike can save time and stress.

Useful for non-academics too.

We don’t all intend to produce high-level research or publish an article!.

There are several ways that a reference manager can help us as information managers in our day job, help organise our own work and improve things for our users too.

Register for MyCiteULIke

To take advantage of all CiteULike’s facilities you need to sign up for MyCiteULIke to create your own library.

Go to www.citeulike.org

Click on the  Join Now button. If you already have an account, log in at the top right.

Use the drop-down menus on the grey toolbar: CiteULike and MyCiteULike to explore other options.

 There are FAQs and a help page too if you get stuck.

Search citations added by other CiteULike users by clicking on the Search button further to the right on the grey toolbar. Enter a word or phrase eg nurse-prescribing and click search.

• Click on one of the articles you want to read or keep for later. It will display the abstract and any links to full text.
• Click the Copy button at the top of the display to save it to your own library.
• Click the Citation button and you can choose to see how it looks in different formats eg APA, Harvard, Vancouver etc.
• Click the Export button and choose the format you’d like your reference to appear in: RTF, PDF or plain text. 

Search  Pubmed  or Google Scholar for articles of interest to you . Use the Posting the URL link in the MyCiteULike drop down menu to add citations of your selected articles to your Library  by posting the URL, DOI , PMID code, ISBN or adding bibliographic details manually. 

You can tick the Privacy box if you want.

Privacy:

Don't let other people see that I've posted this article

Library readers may like others to see what topic they are interested in; If they  leave this box unticked and save 20 favourite articles they can receive recommendations of relevant articles from other CiteULike users 

If you are using CiteUlike at home you can choose to add the CiteULike button to your browser or Favourites toolbar to make adding citations easier

• Go to the CiteULike dropdown menu
• Select the Browser Button option
• Follow the instructions.

You can now add articles and books from the wider internet as you come across them. 

Exercise:

Collect some references into your MyCiteULike Library  and export them in your selected format.

Explore some of the ways you can use it to save time and tidy up reports, search results or reading lists.

Blog your experiences and share with others.

You can do other things with CiteULike too. Try some of these:

• search using the term CiteULike for articles on how to use it and its many features
• create a list of items you have come across or found useful during the 19 things
• search for articles on a different topic you are interested in
• join a group to post one of these articles or books you have found to share with people who have similar interests
• Link to your Facebook profile 

If you have time, try using some other free reference managers eg http://www.mendeley.com and http://www.zotero.org

I even found another one www.hubmed.org  from signing up to CiteULike!

Citation with link to full text at http://www.citeulike.org/user/A_Hoogendam/article/781097  Maybe this could provide us with better results than we get from PubMed. Any offers to convert the doctors?