Common Sense for the Biochemist

I just received an e-mail from Richard Cameron from CiteULike regarding a recent post on social bookmarking that reads in part:

Hi Brian, I just noticed your blog post about CiteUlike. I didn't want to post this as a comment to avoid any attempts at blatant self-publicity, but did you know you can actually upload the yours PDFs to CiteULike? I can keep them on the server for you, so you can access them from anywhere regardless of whether you've got your computer at home set up to proxy through your university's network? There no quota at the moment, but there's obviously a limit to the proportion of the world's information I can keep on my servers, so that that may change at some point. However, hard drive space is cheap and I'm keen to keep the content because it means I can ultimately do full-text searches on it.

Thanks Richard for the heads up (and by the way, you deserve some blatant self-publicity just for visiting my site). I definitely missed a huge feature of your site that changed my entire opinion about it. I have tested this feature out and it works great! I have also noticed that you can import your references from BibTex although I haven't tried that feature out. I am currently using EndNote but I am sure there is a way to save my EndNote references as a BibTex file and import them that way. To be honest, I will still probably keep my full PDF library on my hard drive space simply because a good library can be very time consuming and expensive to collect and I don't want it to be managed by anyone else but me. However, this is a great way to keep a small collection of articles to read while you are travelling or away from your home base or have on hand when traveling to conferences to share with your peers. For those of you who are still fastidiously filing away paper copies of interesting articles and keeping an index with index cards, this could be a great way to start experimenting with an electronic library. I haven't been able to test any of the other features of this site, such as tagging documents or searching them since I haven't built my own library yet but I imagine you could develop some pretty neat ways of organizing your documents with with the tag feature. I think the guy(s) at CiteULike are on to something and you should try it out. But don't blame me when you spend a full day reorganizing your references!