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.
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.
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