CiteULike is a free service to help internet users to store, organise and share the scholarly papers they are reading. When the user see a paper on the web that interests him, ge can click one button and have it added to his personal library. CiteULike automatically extracts the citation details, so there’s no need to type them in himself. It all works from within a web browser so there’s no need to install any software. Because the library is stored on the server, it can be accessed from any computer with an Internet connection.
It was created in November 2004 and further developed in December 2006. The site is based in the UK. The service is free and is run independently of any particular publisher with a liberal privacy policy.
In the style of other popular social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us it allows users to bookmark and “tag” URIs with personal metadata using a Web browser. CiteULike normalizes bookmarks before adding them to its database, which means it calculates whether each URI bookmarked identifies an identical publication added by another user, with an equivalent URI.
CiteULike is based on the principle of social bookmarking and is aimed to promote and to develop the sharing of scientific references amongst researchers. In the same way that it is possible to catalog web pages (with Furl and del.icio.us) or photographs (with Flickr), scientists can share information on academic papers with specific tools developed for that purpose.
Sources:
Citeulike FAQ http://www.citeulike.org/faq/faq.adp
Citeulike in Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CiteULike
