CiteULike Tutorial

Or at least, but not limited to, “collaboratively building LaRA's list of publications”.

CiteULike is a collaborative bibliograhpy system. Every user can create bibliography entries in the system or copy them from other users' library in order to constitute their own. This bibliography can then be exported to various useful formats for use in other bibliography maintenance systems, including BibTeX. In order to collaboratively maintain a (hopefully comprehensive) list of LaRA's scientific output, we propose LaRA authors use CiteULike to create entries for their publications, and submit them to the LaRA group. The following is a quick startup guide for CiteULike with this primary goal in mind, but gives enough details to allow the use of CiteULike as one's main bibliography system.

The following document is based on screenshots. CiteULike is a dynamic progress, thus the interface may have changed a bit since the time these shots were taken. The main concepts, however, should not have changed and the interface elements should be locatted roughly at the same place. The thumbnails of these screenshots are links to the full size version of the images.

When connecting to CiteULike for the first time, a generic index page is displayed, offering the possibility to log in or to create a new account (step 1 in the following figure).

A classical account creation form is then presented. Filling it in is trivial (1), but the reCAPTCHA (2) must not be forgotten beofre signing up (3).

Once the account created, it is possible to use the credentials (1) to login (2).

The user gets redirected to the main collaborative library. The user's own library is accessible clicking on the username at the top of the page (1), which will be empty at first.

From the MyCiteULike menu (1), one can access the list of groups (2).

A new user is not initially member of any group. The next screen then displays an empty list, but allows to search (1) for groups to join (or browse) by name.

A simple entry box (1) allow to fill in the name of the group to search (2)).

Hopefully, there is only one group by that name. The user can see the publications already filled in, and use the group-specific menu (1) to access the information of the group (2).

From the information page, it's possible to join (1) the group, which will facilitate later addition of publication entries in this group.

The option to import a new publication is available in the MyCiteULike (1) menu under the name “Post manually” (2). It is also possible to use “Post URL” for some publisher's repositories (such as IEEE Xplore, the ACM portal and others) to get some metadata pre-filled in.

As an example, the creation of an entry for this very tutorial is presented. The first step is to select the type of document this is (1). This will condition the mandatory metadata (e.g. 2, 3). A superset of the default BibTeX classes are available. The BibTeX key is also a good idea to fill in (4) before validating with one of the “Post Article” buttons.

Now that the publication entry has been created in the system, it is possible to add more classification information to it. Tags (1) are particularly useful for document retrieval. They are a plain text list of keywords. In the case of a LaRA publication it is highly recommended to tag the article with at least lara and the lab name (e.g. 'caor, imara or livic''). This is also the page where the entry can be published to the LaRA group (2). It also features the possibility to identify the willingness to read the document, if not already done (3). Once again, these parameters are validated with the “Post Article” button.

The system then displays the summary page for the newly-created entry. It is possible to specify if the user is an author of the publication (1).

Back to the user's library, it is possible to do various things like exporting it (or a subset of it) to various formats (1) or to filter the entries using their tags (2).

CiteULike is fully interopetable with other reference management systems. Thus, in addition to exporting to these systems, it can also import entries from them still from the MyCiteULike menu (1), with the “Import” option (2).

The entries in the foreign format can either be imported by file (1a) or copy and pasted (1b). A set of tags can be attached to all the imported entries (2) before comfirming the import (3).