Social Bookmarking for Scientists: HotCites
by mitch on Mar 16 2008 (2043 Views)HotCites – It’s What’s Hot in the Literature
A recent website I’ve been developing exploits the collective intelligence of scientists to determine what articles in the literature are attracting the attention of scientists/technicians and the like. The website is HotCites (www.hotcites.com). It parses through new submissions to Nature’s Connotea database and spits out what users (scientists) consider important enough to add to their libraries. I could talk forever about how great Connotea is, the most important selling points for me are the following: Import/Export your database to endnote in less than a minute, see who else has bookmarked an interesting paper, and then view their literature databases, search for papers that others have tagged (ie aromatic, metabolomic), and access to your literature database from any internet connection.
Keeping a database of people’s libraries is all well and good, but there is untapped information that can be extracted. Both CiteULike and Connotea seem to have the databasing side down, but an engaging user environment seems lacking from my tedious perusing. Creating an expanding a community of users is always the most time mitigating part of any successful Web 2.0 website.
So lets move forward and make a more cheerful website, where we’ve already distilled some information from a database and present it back to the end users. A thumb of the front page of HotCites is shown below:
The website immediately has distilled what Connotea users have bookmarked the most frequently for the past week. You can also click to see what the top bookmarked papers are for the day. The database currently only goes back 17 days or so, but as time pases the database will enlarge, and I’ll be making options to go further back. Be mindful that the url to see the past “2 weeks” is just http://www.hotcites.com/index.php?&days=14 , so you can edit the number of days to go back as far as you like. But as I mentioned, the database only goes back 17 days or so.
Getting HotCites fully integrated with Connotea will be mission #1. Hopefully the appealing(in my eyes) nature of the website design we’ll encourage more scientists to use Connotea. An advantage of HotCites is it’ll only show Connotea bookmarks that have resolved DOIs, in order to ensure only literature gets posted. But, editorials also have DOIs, and they will show up too. Expansion to incorporate CiteULike may be possible down the road, but I’m unsure how liberal they are with their database. I hope you like the website, now go sign up for Connotea! 
Mitch
My university subscribes to RefWorks, so I have an account there. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with it, but are there any other advantages (aside from this HotCites site) that Connotea might have over RefWorks? Just seems like it wouldn’t make sense for me to actively try and use both.
I’ve never heard of RefWorks before. I agree it is hard to change after you already have a database. If you can import your RefWorks database to endnote, see what citations others have added to their database, there may be no point. Connotea also has the nice advantage that all you have to supply is the doi and it’ll look up the title/authors/journal and all that other good stuff. Is it possible for me to read through your RefWorks submissions?
Nice work. It would be nice to restrict to chemistry journals. That’s probably a bit of work though.
I’m a developer on CiteULike – I’ve just added this feature to our site, at http://www.citeulike.org/citegeist
With RefWorks you can export to Endnote, but you don’t really need to since you can use RefWorks to do the same stuff as Endnote in terms of writing papers. As for seeing what citations others have added to their database, I don’t think it can do that. Hmm, I thought you were able to add references based on DOI, but I guess not. Some (including ACS journals) give the option to download the RefWorks citation from the abstract, just as you can with Endnote.
So the advantage of this for me is not having to use something web-based AND endnote. Though I agree, this has some nice features… I’ll consider it.
i’m a big fan of CiteULike. the last few times i tried Connotea, i was not impressed. is it better, yet?