I am a big fan of social bookmarking. Hardly a day goes by that I don’t add to my huge collection on Delicious. But recently my online research is not just for blogging but for academic papers. So I have taken a look at three great free tools for social bookmarking that will let me register a wide range of bibliographic information. These tools also facilitate online research collaboration and networking.

Zotero
Zotero is developed by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. It is a Firefox plug-in and the interface is available in more than 30 languages.

Once it is installed, Zotero is available by clicking the Zotero logo in the bottom right corner of your browser window. This brings up a 3 pane registering box. By entering information in this box you can gather, organize, and analyze sources like citations, full texts, web pages, images, and other objects.

Like reference management software, Zotero includes the ability to store author, title, and publication fields and to export that information as formatted references. In addition Zotero has tagging and a search box that displays results as you type.

Zotero integrates with online resources; it can often sense when users are viewing a book, article, or other object on the web, and—on major research and library sites—find and automatically save the full reference information for the item in the correct fields.

I have two problems with Zotero: Firstly, your Zotero library is stored in the Firefox files on you computer and not online. I am on the move a lot and work from different computers, so this is a serious drawback. The developers suggest installing Portable Firefox on a removable USB drive. Why not store the data online like Delicious? Secondly, the options for sharing are limited — no surprise when all the information is local. But I miss ways to share references with colleagues.

Connotea

Connotea is developed by Nature Publishing Group. This tool is exactly what I was hoping for: An advanced Delicious for bibliographic references. I’m particularly fond of the many search options. An extra perk for you geeks out there is that the source code is Open Source (GNU GPL).

You save references by clicking a bookmarklet in your browser. Wherever possible, Connotea will recognise the reference and automatically add in the bibliographic information for you. To organise your references, you simply tag them.

Sharing your library is easy. It has its own URL which you can send to your colleagues or they can subscribe to an rss feed of new library entries. Each tag and each search also has an rss feed.

You can also connect to other users of Connotea to form a network and exchange information. There is even an option to form groups — public or closed — for specific themes or fields of interest.

You can export your entire library or entries for selected tags. There is a wide range of export options: RIS, EndNote, BibText, MODS (XML), Word 2007 bibliography, RDF or plain text.

2collab

2collab is developed by Elsevier. It is in many ways the best of the three: It has an emphasis on collaboration and caters to researchers, teachers, students and librarians. Unfortunately for some, it is designed especially for the science, technical and medical communities.

The emphasis on collaboration makes 2collab more than just a place to store, categorise and manage your scholarly bookmarks. It is also easy to discover new research material, share and identify quality information and mine the collective wisdom of experts. You can also form discussions in private groups or openly with the wider scientific community.

You can add references easily by using a bookmarklet in your browser or importing them from your browser, another social bookmarking site, an RIS file or from a Scopus Author ID.

You can export references in these formats: HTML, RIS, BibTeX, LaTeX, CSV and TXT. In addition, your library or parts of it can be shared online by e-mail and rss or sent to groups of colleagues in 2collab.

Like Connotea and Zotero, 2collab tries to identify relevant information on the web page and fill in the standard fields required for registration (title, author, etc). None of the three services do this convincingly. However, this is as much a problem with meta data as a problem with the reference tools.