Science Intelligence and InfoPros

Most academic journals insist that papers submitted to them conform to the journals own, idiosyncratic citation style. This has led to a proliferation of thousands of different citation styles, often with only minuscule differences in the placement of commas, or the use of quotation marks and italics. To support their users in this arduous task, modern reference management tools like Mendeley ship with 2,789 different citation styles that can be used when formatting a bibliography in Word or Open Office.

It turns out that 2,789 was still not enough. Being able to edit and create new citation styles easily was the top-ranked feature request by a wide margin on Mendeley’s user feedback board. Users frequently lamented that the one particular style they needed was not covered, or that they were unable to switch from tools such as EndNote or RefWorks as long as a particular style was lacking. The citation styles in EndNote or RefWorks are built in a closed, proprietary format, which prevents their re-use in other referencing tools. In response, scholars have created the open source CSL (Citation Style Language) standard, which has since been implemented in tools such as Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, Docear, and Qiqqa. (…)

Mendeley’s global community of 2 million academics have collectively uploaded more than 300 million research documents to the platform, making it one of the world’s largest academic databases. Now, Mendeley will apply the same principle of crowdsourcing to citation styles.

Mendeley Introduces Open Source Citation Style Editor. Information Today, the 6th of December 2012.

https://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/Digest/Mendeley-Introduces-Open-Source-Citation-Style-Editor-86566.asp

Aaron Tay gives here an interesting vision of this still-promising tool:

“while looking at the features I finally grasped how powerful and disruptive a real and dominant “Facebook for researchers” is going to be. (…)

Of course, the road to such a goal has being strewn with many failures, including Elsevier’s 2collab , Labmeeting etc (check a report in 2008 of such tools and check how many still stands) and attempts have being or could be made from social bookmarking/reference management angle (e.g citeulike/Connotea/Mendeley),  Discovery/Search angle (potentially webscale discovery/next generation catalogues with social features) or  even more directly straight forward Identity management (e.g. ResearcherID).

But no matter who wins how would a dominant “Facebook for researchers” platform affect academic research and hence academic libraries? What areas would they disrupt? (..)

Disrupt search including webscale discovery tools

Mendeley , Citeulike etc are already starting to show hints of this, when you search you can see how many people put a certain article in their reference libraries, that itself could be a strong signal of quality. (…)

Currently Mendeley claims to have 150 million unique items (Jan 2012) when you search Mendeley , “This makes it, according to Victor Henning, the company’s CEO and co-founder, the world’s largest research database.” (…)

Read more at:

Tay, Aaron. How a “Facebook for researchers” platform will disrupt almost everything. Musing about librarianship, April 18, 2012. Available at: https://musingsaboutlibrarianship.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/how-facebook-for-researchers-will.html [Accessed 18th April 2012]