Connotea

Melissa L. Rethlefsen
5 april - the Nature Publishing Group's answer to del.icio.us <http://del.icio.us>, is an online social bookmarking tool designed for scientists. Instead of managing general bookmarks, however, Connotea exists to manage references and collections of scientific articles. Because it is a social tool, the references that a Connotea user bookmarks are public and can be shared with colleagues and workgroups across the world.
For those familiar with other social bookmarking tools, using Connotea poses few challenges. Even those not familiar with social bookmarking tools can get a Connotea account up and running in a matter of minutes. Once users set up a personal account (a simple procedure requiring only a name, username, password, and email address), they can install a “browser button,” a bookmarklet that enables users to add citations to Connotea in one click. Browser buttons are available for Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari. In the advanced account options, users can associate their Connotea account with their institution's OpenURL server to improve access to full-text content.
Users can add references to Connotea in several ways. The easiest is the aforementioned browser button. From any web page, clicking the browser button opens a pop-up window where users can add tags (or keywords), a description, or comments and mark a bookmark private. Single or multi-word tags are possible. A generic form is also available for saving citations to Connotea—the form even allows users to simply enter a digital object identifier (DOI) number to instantly bookmark the corresponding full-text article. Users can also batch upload citations from standard bibliographic management tools like EndNote; Firefox bookmarks; and BibTex, RIS, or MODS files. Only citations with associated uniform resource locators (URLs) will be imported, however.
As with other social bookmarking tools, users can see information on other users who bookmarked each resource. It is also easy to find new resources by browsing tags and related users. A tag cloud of that day's most popular tags is a good place to start browsing. The main Nature.com website also lists a few of the day's most popular tags. Each tag, user, and tag-and-user combination has an associated really simple syndication (RSS) feed for easy tracking. Standard URL syntax makes creating complex RSS feeds easy. For example, to create an RSS feed for new Connotea items from either user “ben” or “timo” with the tags “connotea” and “npg,” the URL would be http://www.connotea.org/rss/user/ben/timo/tag/connotea+npg.
To enhance sharing of references among colleagues and peers, Connotea developed a group feature. Any user can create a public or private group, and all group members' new citations are added automatically to the group account. Users have requested an upgrade to Connotea that would allow individuals to send only select bookmarks to the groups to which they belong. There is no networking feature comparable to the del.icio.us network, so the only way to track individuals' new bookmarks is via RSS.
To work as a reference manager and not just another social bookmarking tool, Connotea stores complete citation information for journal articles, books, blogs, and other reference types. For many common or science-oriented websites, Connotea automatically captures and parses the bibliographic metadata associated with journal articles, books, and blogs. Examples of sites with automatically captured metadata include Nature.com, Amazon, PubMed, BioMed Central, arXiv, PLoS, and Wiley Interscience. When bookmarking a resource without automated metadata capture, the form allows users to input complete citation information themselves. This level of metadata makes it easy to export any Connotea library into another bibliographic management tool.
Connotea, like del.icio.us, encourages developers to create new tools and enhancements for Connotea users using the Connotea application programming interface [1]. Many user-created tools are Greasemonkey scripts (Firefox only), though non-Firefox users can find several useful tools as well. A large number of developed tools are designed to integrate Connotea into PubMed, varying from PubMed search tools customized for Connotea users (Connotea Client), to a tool that puts “Add to Connotea” links in each PubMed record (PubMed2Connotea), to a tool that alerts PubMed searchers to citations that have been bookmarked in Connotea (PubConn). One particularly interesting tool is Entity Describer, a pair of Greasemonkey scripts designed to help users make use of controlled vocabularies like Medical Subject Headings when bookmarking. Connotea's source code is also available for download and modification under a GNU general public license.
Connotea's only major competition in the social reference management market is CiteULike, a similar tool designed largely for humanities scholars. CiteULike's major benefit over Connotea is portable document format (PDF) storage: users can upload their PDF files to CiteULike and access them from anywhere. Basic social bookmarking sites and del.icio.us do not have the metadata capabilities that Connotea does, so for the scholar, Connotea may be a better tool. Its focus on scientists and researchers also means that medical library clientele will be more likely to find peers and colleagues to track or collaborate with in Connotea than in another social bookmarking service.
Overall, Connotea is a very easy, time-saving way for scientists, researchers, and medical librarians to keep track of and discover the literature they need.

Reference
Connotea tools [web document]. London, UK: Nature Publishing Group, 2007. [rev. 18 Oct 2007; cited 29 Oct 2007]. <http://www.connotea.org/ wiki/ConnoteaTools>.