Store, manage, and share your reading list

The cleverly-named del.icio.us site describes itself as "social bookmarks." The "bookmarks" part allows users to keep track of links online, include a short description, and add an arbitrary number of one-word tags to help categorize the link. With the
"social" part, people's bookmarks are available to everone else.


Here's my list of bookmarks. (I just started, it's not very large)

For the academic world, Richard Cameron created CiteULike. It allows assigning category tags to papers, and has the social aspect of sharing links to papers. Perhaps most importantly, it can automatically import bibliographic information from supported publishers (including arXiv) and export the information to other formats (BibTex, EndNote).


Here's my list of articles. (Once again, very small so far)

The link to CiteULike was found via Corante

I don't know whether either of these will be a useful tool for research, but it seems worthwhile to try them out. When I started grad school in 1993, I went to the library to photocopy articles. By the time I finished in 2000, I went to the library website to download articles. That seems like a large shift, but I suspect it's not just because it makes it faster and more efficient to get the articles - it's the linking, management, and annotations represented by these sorts of applications that will make a bigger change in the future.