Connotea: Saving References Made Simple

This article was written by Helen Jaques.

Surfing the web, you come across a great journal article that you don’t have time to read immediately or think might come in useful when you’re writing your next research paper. A few days later you try to find the abstract again, but where is it?! Buried in your web browser favourites menu? Scrawled on a piece of paper you’re sure you left right by the computer?

If you often have this problem, the social bookmarking website Connotea could be the answer. Connotea is a free online reference programme for scientists, researchers and clinicians.

Connotea allows users to save an article or website in their own personal library, which is stored on the Connotea servers. This library can then be accessed online from any computer, be it your home laptop, the old PC in your lab or the computer in your local internet cafe.

The social bookmarking site Delicious, founded in 2003, was the first online tool for saving websites. When Delicious saves a web page, it only stores the title and URL, plus user generated tags if provided. For scientists, however, remembering and locating a journal article often depends on information other than the article title; for example, the first author, the last author or the journal it was published in.

Connotea was created in 2004 by Nature Publishing Group, who decided “to take the Delicious model and add features that would be specifically useful to academics”, says Ian Mulvany, Product Development Manager in charge of Connotea.

One of these features is that Connotea automatically adds in bibliographic information when a website is saved, making it much easier for scientists to locate papers at a later date. “[Connotea is] about making extracting citations from web pages as easy as bookmarking web pages”, says Ian.

The simplest approach to saving articles to your Connotea library involves first downloading the ‘Add to Connotea’ browser button. Then, when you’re on a web page of interest, just click on said button in your browser toolbar. Add some tags and a description or comment in the pop up window that appears, click a button and you’re done. That’s right, no interruptions like cutting and pasting or opening up a different program.

An article can be tagged with keywords, such as ‘dissertation’ or ‘kick-ass drosophila research’. Clicking on a tag of interest will not only pull up all your own saved papers with this keyword, but also papers in the libraries of other Connotea users who are tagging articles on the same subjects as you.

This aspect to the site makes it easy to stumble across new articles and links that may prove useful. You can even get an RSS feed of a particular user or tag, making sure that you don’t miss a single article of interest.

In addition, Connotea has a groups function that allows you to track what your colleagues or collaborators are reading. “The idea is that if a group of people are doing a literature review together they can create a group as a place to bring all of their bookmarks together”, says Ian.

Once a group has been created, say for UCL neuroscience labs, and users have been added, all the bookmarks of all the users will be displayed on one single group page. This page can be filtered by tag in order to unearth exactly what papers your colleagues are reading on your pet subject.

So, what happens when you come to write your research paper and want to reference a load of articles saved in your Connotea library? Connotea allows you to export your library to a desktop reference management system such as Endnote, from which you can then add references to the document you are working on.

You can also import references to Connotea in big batches rather than individually by saving references in RIS format and using the Connotea import function. Additionally, you can import your favourites from Firefox in one batch.

Importantly, Connotea is Open ID enabled. Open ID is a project dedicated to enabling one digital identity than be used across many websites. For example, if you have a Google login and password, you can use this on any site that supports Open ID, instead of setting up a new login and password for each site you visit.

If you have Open ID details then you can log into Connotea straight away at http://www.connotea.org/openid without needing to set up an account — one will be generated for you automatically. At the moment Connotea doesn’t host or generate OpenID’s, but if you have one you can use it to log in to the website.

So next time you can’t remember the details of that online paper you need, don’t spend hours rifling through the piles of paper on your desk — look in your Connotea library.

• For more information on how to use Connotea, have a look at the beginners guide video tutorial.

About the author: Helen Jaques is a British freelance medical writer and editor. Helen has written for publications such as The Lancet Oncology and The European Heart Journal and copy edits for BMJ Group and Nature Publishing Group. She also blogs about medicine and health at www.helenjaques.co.uk. Helen saves articles on Connotea under the username hjaqu001.

Additional reference management resources are listed in the NGS Registry.