Are you still strug­gling to orga­nize your arti­cle col­lec­tion man­u­ally? The recent PLoS Com­pu­ta­tional Biol­ogy arti­cle reviews sev­eral next gen­er­a­tion web bib­li­o­graphic tools and com­pare them. Authors empha­size sev­eral issues with cur­rent tools and pos­si­ble ways how to over­come them. Do you use any men­tioned desk­top or web – based tools? Why?

Many sci­en­tists now man­age the bulk of their bib­li­o­graphic infor­ma­tion elec­tron­i­cally, thereby orga­niz­ing their pub­li­ca­tions and cita­tion mate­r­ial from dig­i­tal libraries. How­ever, a library has been described as “thought in cold stor­age,” and unfor­tu­nately many dig­i­tal libraries can be cold, imper­sonal, iso­lated, and inac­ces­si­ble places. In this Review, we dis­cuss the cur­rent chilly state of dig­i­tal libraries for the com­pu­ta­tional biol­o­gist, includ­ing PubMed, IEEE Xplore, the ACM dig­i­tal library, ISI Web of Knowl­edge, Sco­pus, Cite­seer, arXiv, DBLP, and Google Scholar. We illus­trate the cur­rent process of using these libraries with a typ­i­cal work­flow, and high­light prob­lems with man­ag­ing data and meta­data using URIs. We then exam­ine a range of new appli­ca­tions such as Zotero, Mende­ley, Meken­tosj Papers, MyNCBI, CiteU­Like, Con­notea, and HubMed that exploit the Web to make these dig­i­tal libraries more per­sonal, socia­ble, inte­grated, and acces­si­ble places. We con­clude with how these appli­ca­tions may begin to help achieve a dig­i­tal defrost, and dis­cuss some of the issues that will help or hin­der this in terms of mak­ing libraries on the Web warmer places in the future, becom­ing resources that are con­sid­er­ably more use­ful to both humans and machines.

Dun­can Hull, Steve R. Pet­tifer, Dou­glas B. Kell (2008). Defrost­ing the Dig­i­tal Library: Bib­li­o­graphic Tools for the Next Gen­er­a­tion Web PLoS Com­pu­ta­tional Biol­ogy, 4 (10) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000204

21st November, 2008