That's How It Happened

How to: Use del.icio.us to manage your academic references.
If you have ever written an academic paper, particularly in a scientific discipline, you know how tough it is to cope with the abstracts and papers that need to be referenced at the end of your piece. If you are anything like me, your desk ends up buried under a pile of indistinguishable print-outs from Medline. Worse still comes the moment when you submit the paper, and realise that you have cited your references incorrectly. Harvard instead of Vancouver format, or some other obscure house style. There is professional software to help you cope with this nightmare. End Note is quite good at what it does, but it costs £125 just as a download. You can gain all the important functionality, with a little extra Web2.0 goodness on top, for free, thanks to the wonder of del.icio.us

Step 1 Download a desktop del.icio.us client. I happen to like Cocoalicious. There are lots of different tools to choose from. If you are paranoid about colleagues or competitors stealing your work, you might want to use private bookmarking.

Step 2 Register a new del.icio.us username. It's not like Yahoo! can't afford it, and you don't want your references getting mixed up with your scheisse porn, or your knitting patterns.

Step 3 When you find an abstract or reference you think might be interesting or relevant, bookmark it. If you are away from your desk, in the library perhaps, you just add it to the same del.icio.us account.

Step 4 Discipline, discipline, discipline. If this is going to save you time, you have to be rigorous here. For the description of the URL, choose the exact title of the paper, plus possibly the authors, if that will help you remember it.

Step 5 For the extended description, copy across the complete reference. Journal, authors (including their first names), volume, date, and pages. You never know how much of this you'll be required to cite, so get it all down now.

Step 6 Tagging. This is where the 2.0-ness comes good. Tag the URL with all the MeSH keywords from Medline. In addition tag it with a term that identifies it as relevant to your paper. If you're writing a thesis on scheisse, be sure to add a "scheisse" tag, so you can find all the abstracts you need at once.

Step 7 More tagging. Devise your own todo system of tags. If you have the abstract but need the full text, tag it to remind you of that. If you have only glanced at the abstract, and need to read it in full, tag that too. You could use "tododownload" and "todoread".

Step 8 Get writing, searching and citing. The Webclips feature in Cocoalicious, is indispensible here. Don't forget to use the proper endnote options in Word. As you finalise the references that will be included in your paper, either add an additional tag, perhaps "final", or give them a high rating (not possible in all del.icio.us clients). Drag the references as required, directly from Cocoalicious to Word, and amend them to the chosen citation style. All the information you need will be there at your fingertips, less than two clicks away.

Step 9 Bask in academic glory.

I hope this is helpful to other lowly research fellows like myself, and maybe even to the odd web-literate professor. If you have any other hints, hacks, or tweaks, leave them in the comments and I'll incorporate them.