Bookmarking Articles Comparison

I just read an article from the Journal of Librarianship and Information and Information Science. I record some/most of my professional reading as evidence to support my PD points (ALIA) come audit times, and also to share with others interesting articles. For both of these purposes I like to use a social citation/bookmarking site.

In this case the article was quite interesting, but the purpose of this post is to describe the relative ease of bookmarking this to a site which supports academic citation management, rather than a popular bookmarking site like del.icio.us.

The article:

Flickr’s potential as an academic image resource: An exploratory study
Emma Angus, David Stuart, and Mike Thelwall
Journal of Librarianship and Information Science 42 (4), 268-78 (29 Nov 2010)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0961000610384656

The following were all done using Chrome browser.

The Connotea experience

I haven’t used Connotea so much lately since Mendeley and Zotero web came on the scene, and also Diigo which does not support citation management but offers some other useful features such as webslides. What prompted me to add this to Connotea was that the SAGE page for this article offered a share button for Connotea. Unfortunately, it only grabbed the DOI link and I had to add all the citation details myself. Adding to the challenge was that it did not open in a new window/tab so I had to save it, then in Connotea find the bookmark and update it.

What I’d like to see is SAGE offering the metadata up for Connotea to harvest it in one step for both the on-page Connotea button as well as the bookmarklets.

I could have used the Connotea option in the Shareaholic extension I use in Chrome, but that share button on the page was an experiment waiting to happen. Or I could have used the bookmarklets offered at the Connotea site, but both require manual entry of data until the article metadata can be harvested.

The Mendeley Experience

I have saved the Mendeley web importer bookmarklet to my bookmarks. You can see the “Import to Mendeley” option in the illustration.

In Chrome the pop-up is initially blocked, but the option to import and/or change pop-up settings is accessible from the address bar.  The pop-up offered options to quickly add tags and notes and then click through to view the article in My Library. The citation data was imported into the appropriate fields. This will not work with every website, but it appears that the integration with SAGE has been put in place.

Zotero Experience

Zotero is a marvellous citation manager which started as a Firefox plugin, and more recently offered web synchronisation. Until resourcing (either via donation or volunteerism) is available porting functionality to Chrome is only a much-desired feature. There is also no option for manually creating a citation without the zotero plugin in Firefox.

How do browser habits fit into this?

My web browser habits vary. At work with a laptop (with extra monitor) I use Firefox and IE (for Sharepoint) and occasionally Chrome. If I use my work laptop at home (occasionally and for work purposes) I’ll use Firefox and some times Chrome. On the netbook which I use most of the time when I’m not at work I’ll use Chrome. At the desktop I tend to use Firefox – but it’s not often I use the desktop.

With this fluid browser choice Mendeley is the more flexible option. Connotea still has one great feature I love for making use of other people’s bookmarks (at least those that have citation details added) – option to add your institution’s openURL resolver. This means you can more easily get behind paywalls to your library’s subscription databases.

The other great tool in Firefox, and to a lesser extent in IE, is the LibX toolbar. This is not a citation manager, but it has some fabulous tools for locating resources and facilitating access to subscription databases. And these are the kinds of activities that fit with bookmarking and citation management.

There are so many factors in play making it a complex decision on best methods.