Bibliographies for the 21st century, why Zotero rules!

Byoliveridley

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.

via PLoS Computational Biology: Defrosting the Digital Library: Bibliographic Tools for the Next Generation Web

zoteroInteresting look at how to manage scientific information. I use zotero these days. Zotero is a firefox addon that works within the browser, hence is platform independent. It is incredibly powerful, automatically imports meta data from a lot of journal sites, links to microsoft word and openoffice for “cite as you write” and bibliographic generation behaviour, stores pdfs, word docs, excel files, etc as attachments to your citations so if you have a little calculation routine you got from a paper, you can put that in an excel spreadsheet and always have it linked to the paper.

You can synchronize the database to the cloud. And, if you have access to a server with webdav, you can synchronize your attachments as well (i have not tried this yet).

Best of all, it is free and open source.

Anyway, the days of ridiculously expensive and arcane tools like endnote are over.

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    [youtube=’http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=bUlkOLLa31s’]