Dealing with scientific literature has been one important theme in Chemical blogspace.\nFor example, ranking articles and how to store your personal PDF archive has been topics of discussion. In this blog I will\nsummarize bits of the discussion, and my personal view on things.
\n\nSearching literature is traditionally done in systems like Chemical Abstracts and Web-of-Science. The open nature of a\ngrowing number of repositories (e.g. the Dutch DARE) and\nindexing facilities like PubMed make these proprietary tools\nobsolete.
\n\nIt is incorrect to assume that these payed services are the only trustworthy sources. Even WoS fails to make the all\nlinks between entries in the database. For example, I am aware of two missing citations to articles I have written,\neven though both the cited and the citing article is available in the system. One of the citing articles was in the\nAngewandte Chemie!
\n\nAdditionally, some search services, like Google Scholar, have the advantage that they\nfind copies and close variants of articles in proprietary articles on home pages and in open repositories. Today,\nI learned about Scientific Commons which indexes and links to a staggering\n1.5M publications, using, among others, PubMed and university repositories. Where possible it makes direct links\nto PDF versions of the article.
\n\nMitch set up ChemRank,\nto which Peter , the ChemBlog\nand I replied . Afterwards,\nI learned that other services are available too, that allow, in addition to setting up an online personal literature\ndatabase, voting and commenting on articles.
\n\nApparently, CiteULike (CUL) supports this too. In contrast to ChemRank, CUL requires\na login, which I personally see as an advantage, because I can browse literature bookmarked by other accounts I trust.\nThere is also Connotea but I never liked that site that much (e.g. is allows bookmarking\nany web page); Rich has his comments too .\nI would also like to mention BioWizard which is based on the PubMed content, which actually\ncovers a good deal of chemistry literature nowadays too.
\n\nThese above mentioned systems can be used as alternative to offline bibliographic database systems, like EndNote and\nJabRef. The latter is my favorite, being based on BibTeX which I use for my LaTeX based\npublications, and is opensource and contains a few patches\nfrom yours truly. Jungfreudlich wondered how people organized their PDF archive\nand I commented how I do it:
\n\nJörg and\nthe power of goo replied too.
\n\nI have accounts on several online tools now (with some duplication which I don’t like), and I have no idea which of\nthe options will stay around. Time will learn. Good news is that the open characters of many of these allow making\nmashups, and generally integrate tools. For example, JabRef allows downloading citations from PubMed, and Noel\nsuggested to use Greasemonkey scripts to link to the supplementary information for his articles,\ninstead of using the mechanisms journals have. I can see the advantage of this, as, for example,\nWiley takes full copyright of the data in SI material ,\nwhile Noel’s mechanism would keep the data open.
\n\nFor now, however, I would very much like to see a meta service where I can query rankings and comment for\narticles using any or all of the above tools.
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