Social Bookmarking tools for scientists: a test

Social bookmarking tools enable people to bookmark interesting resources on the web, tag them, and share the information with other users.

Scientists want to store, search, and share professional, scholarly literature.  Today there are four established social bookmarking tools serving academic purposes:

1. CiteULike (www.citeulike.org),
2. Connotea (www.connotea.org),
3. BibSonomy (www.bibsonomy.org),
4. and 2collab (www.2collab.com).

 In social bookmarking, users play the key role. The whole idea is to profit from content created by a large number of users.

The competition among BibSonomy, CiteULike, and Connotea raises the question of whether one service will be able to gain an edge over its competitors.

Results of the test:

The road testing was to create 10 references from various publishers to see how often bookmark was successfullty created without subsequent manual correction

• CITEULIKE:
  • 480,000 visits per month
  • +++: Citegeist (most popular articles)
  • Road testing: 8/10
• CONNOTEA:
  • 690,000 visits:per month
  • +++: My Library toolbox
  • +++: target the medical community
  • Road testing: 3/10
• BIBSONOMY:
  • 620,000 visits per month
  • Road testing: 4/10
• 2COLLAB:
  • 44,000 visits per month
  • Road testing: 1/10

Because of its poor abilities (except with ScienceDirect references) 2collab is renamed “2collapse” by authors of the article!

Sabrina Reher; Stefanie Haustein. Social Bookmarking in STM: PUTTING SERVICES TO THE ACID TEST. ONLINE, Vol.34, N°6, Nov-Dec 2010, pp. 34-42