CiteULike was a web service which allowed users to save and share

citation A citation is a reference to a source. More precisely, a citation is an abbreviated alphanumeric expression embedded in the body of an intellectual work that denotes an entry in the bibliographic references section of the work for the purpose o ...

s to academic papers. Based on the principle of

social bookmarking Social bookmarking is an online service which allows users to add, annotate, edit, and share Internet bookmark, bookmarks of web documents. Many online bookmark management services have launched since 1996; Delicious (website), Delicious, founded i ...

, the site worked to promote and to develop the sharing of scientific references amongst researchers. In the same way that it is possible to catalog

web page A web page (or webpage) is a World Wide Web, Web document that is accessed in a web browser. A website typically consists of many web pages hyperlink, linked together under a common domain name. The term "web page" is therefore a metaphor of pap ...

s (with Furl and delicious) or photographs (with

Flickr Flickr ( ) is an image hosting service, image and Online video platform, video hosting service, as well as an online community, founded in Canada and headquartered in the United States. It was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and was previously a co ...

), scientists could share citation information using CiteULike. Richard Cameron developed CiteULike in November 2004 and in 2006 Oversity Ltd. was established to develop and support CiteULike. In February 2019, CiteULike announced that it would be ceasing operations as of March 30, 2019. When browsing issues of research journals, small scripts stored in bookmarks ( bookmarklets) allowed one to import articles from repositories like

PubMed PubMed is an openly accessible, free database which includes primarily the MEDLINE database of references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics. The United States National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institute ...

, and CiteULike supported many more. Then the system attempted to determine the article metadata (title, authors, journal name, etc.) automatically. Users could organize their libraries with freely chosen tags and this produces a

folksonomy Folksonomy is a classification system in which end users apply public tags to online items, typically to make those items easier for themselves or others to find later. Over time, this can give rise to a classification system based on those tag ...

of academic interests.

Basic principles

Initially, one added a reference to CiteULike directly from within a

web browser A web browser, often shortened to browser, is an application for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's scr ...

, without needing a separate program. For common online databases like

, author names, title, and other details were imported automatically. One could manually add tags for grouping of references. The web site could be used to search public references by all users or only one's own references. References could later be exported via BibTeX or

EndNote EndNote is a commercial reference management software package, used to manage bibliography, bibliographies and Citation, references when writing essays, reports and articles. EndNote was written by Richard Niles, and ownership changed hands se ...

to be used on local computers.

Creation of entries and definition of keywords

CiteULike provided bookmarklets to quickly add references from the web pages of the most common sites. These small scripts read the citation information from the web page and imported into the CiteULike database for the currently logged in user. Sites supported for semi-automatic import included Amazon.com,

arXiv.org arXiv (pronounced as "archive"—the X represents the Greek letter chi ⟨χ⟩) is an open-access repository of electronic preprints and postprints (known as e-prints) approved for posting after moderation, but not peer reviewed. It con ...

JSTOR JSTOR ( ; short for ''Journal Storage'') is a digital library of academic journals, books, and primary sources founded in 1994. Originally containing digitized back issues of academic journals, it now encompasses books and other primary source ...

, PLoS,

, SpringerLink, and

ScienceDirect ScienceDirect is a searchable web-based bibliographic database, which provides access to full texts of scientific and medical publications of the Dutch publisher Elsevier as well of several small academic publishers. It hosts over 18 million ...

. It was also possible although more time-consuming to add entries manually. Entries could be tagged for easier retrieval and organisation. More frequent tags were displayed in a proportionally larger font. Tags could be clicked to call up articles containing this tag.

Sharing and exporting entries

New entries were added as ''public'' by default, which made them accessible to everyone. Entries could be added as ''private'' and were then only available to the specific user. Users of CiteULike thus automatically shared all their public entries with other users. The tags assigned to public entries contributed to the site-wide tag network. All public references could also be searched and filtered by tag. In addition, the site provided ''groups'' that users could join themselves or by invitation. Groups were typically labs, institutions, professions, or research areas. On line CiteULike entries could be downloaded to a local computer by means of export functions. One export format was BibTeX, the referencing system used in

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and

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. The BibTeX output could also be imported directly into Overleaf. The RIS file format was also available for commercial bibliography programs such as

Reference Manager Reference Manager was the first commercial reference management software package sold by Thomson Reuters. It was the first commercial software of its kind, originally developed by Ernest Beutler and his son, Earl B. Beutler, Earl Beutler, in 198 ...

. It also allowed import into the free Zotero bibliography extension of

Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements curr ...

. Export was possible for individual entries or the entire library. CiteULike gave access to personal or shared bibliographies directly from the web. It allowed one to see what other people had posted publicly, which tags they had added, and how they had commented and rated a paper. It was also possible to browse the public libraries of people with similar interests to discover interesting papers. Groups allowed individual users to collaborate with other users to build a library of references. The data were backed up daily from the central server.

Software

CiteULike was written in Tcl, with user contributed plugins in Python,

Perl Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Though Perl is not officially an acronym, there are various backronyms in use, including "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language". Perl was developed ...

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and Tcl; some additional modules were written in

Java Java is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea (a part of Pacific Ocean) to the north. With a population of 156.9 million people (including Madura) in mid 2024, proje ...

; data were stored using

PostgreSQL PostgreSQL ( ) also known as Postgres, is a free and open-source software, free and open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) emphasizing extensibility and SQL compliance. PostgreSQL features transaction processing, transactions ...

There was no

API An application programming interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how to build ...

but plugins could be contributed using

Subversion Subversion () refers to a process by which the values and principles of a system in place are contradicted or reversed in an attempt to sabotage the established social order and its structures of Power (philosophy), power, authority, tradition, h ...

. The software behind the service was

closed source Proprietary software is software that grants its creator, publisher, or other rightsholder or rightsholder partner a legal monopoly by modern copyright and intellectual property law to exclude the recipient from freely sharing the software or modi ...

, but the dataset collected by the users was in the

public domain The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work to which no Exclusive exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly Waiver, waived, or may be inapplicable. Because no one holds ...

About the site

The site stemmed from personal scientific requirements. The initial author found existing bibliography software cumbersome. CiteULike was created in November 2004 and further developed in December 2006, running until March 2019. The site was based in the UK. The service was free and was run independently of any particular publisher with a liberal privacy policy.

References

External links

* {{cite web , title=CiteULike: Everyone's library , url=http://www.citeulike.org/ , url-status=usurped , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190328231005/http://www.citeulike.org/ , archive-date=2019-03-28 Library 2.0 Social bookmarking websites Reference management software Social information processing Internet properties established in 2004 Social cataloging applications Internet properties disestablished in 2019