Common Sense for the Biochemist

Thanks to Matthew Wygant for a few suggestions of other social bookmarks that I should check out from a previous post. Per his suggestion, I did check out Connotea and CiteULike and here are my thoughts: Connotea: Nature Magazine still doesn't have this website stuff down. Granted, in the last year or so they have made their website a little easier to navigate, before that, reading Nature online was atrocious. The site is still a little hard to navigate. The same can be said for Connotea. The user interface is pretty clean, which is a plus, but it is really hard to manually add a bookmark (is the add form even accesible from your login homepage?). Nature's servers are also slow, probably because of them being located 1/3 of the world away (I assume). I did run into some problems with slow loading pages with Connotea also. Of course, del.icio.us has some server slowdowns also. All-in-all, I would say don't even try it, well, try it, but I'll bet you won't like it after you have tried del.icio.us. I am willing to bet that at some point, Nature will lose interest in this project (they are magazine publisher, not Google), and this project will eventually wither out. CiteULike Actually, this is a pretty neat little site. However, in order to access a paper from this site, you must have a subscription to the journal that it is located in. OK for me, I just have to work through MSUs network (I can proxy from home too). Personally, if I have a paper that I want to keep as a reference, I get a PDF copy of it on my hard drive. When coupled with a reference manager program like EndNote, you can make yourself a pretty nice little reference library. I don't want to suddenly not have access to a paper simply because the new institution I am at does not have a subscription to that journal. CiteULike is a good idea and may work for some people, but it doesn't help me.