Juli Davis' Page

Introduction: Welcome to Connotea

For anyone who has spent time online doing research, whether as a student, a researcher, an instructor, or an information professional, keeping an organized listing of references can prove time consuming. Reference keeping goes far beyond bookmarking because this information is vital for bibliographical purposes.

Thanks to the ongoing growth of Web 2.0 tools, Internet users have useful applications available at their fingertips. Connotea is an online reference management site that allows users to save references to a personalized library and share these resources if needed and it's free. For users who are familiar with Delicious, formerly known as del.icio.us, this site will seem very similar. It operates on the same premise of sharing bookmarks but targets an audience that is more academic and scientific.

What Can Connotea Do For You?

Although Connotea defines the site as free online reference management for clinicians and scientists, it can be used by anyone who has a need for saving and organizing links. There are special features for those who primarily use medical or scientific resources such as PubMed which make saving bibliographic data less daunting. By utilizing tags, users can easily organize their links in a manner that makes most sense to them.

As previously mentioned, the site is free and is web-based, so users can access the site and their saved library from any computer with Internet access. Each library is private but users have the option of maintaining their library publicly which allows anyone to access the saved references. Users can also limit access by sharing their library with designated users. This is beneficial for anyone working on a collaborative project.

For additional information gathering, users can navigate to the site's blog and community pages. There are also links to user profile pages, tag pages and group pages, which can also assist in researching useful links to expand a bibliography or general knowledge.

According to Melissa L. Rethlefsen, one feature to highlight is "users can not only add notes, annotations, and tags to their citations but also claim authorship on materials--an excellent tool for networking and sharing information among scholars." She also points out that navigation is not necessarily intuitive, so apparently there is a learning curve involved.

To learn more about using the site, Connotea provides video tutorials on its site guide tab.

A Product of Nature

Connotea is a product of Nature Publishing Group, which is best known for publishing Nature, a scientific journal. NPG, a global company, is a division of Macmillan Publishers Ltd.

The site debuted in beta format in December 2004 and was awarded the ALPSP (Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers) Award for Publishing Innovation in 1995.

Consider Connotea

Organize, Share, Discover.

These three words appear at the top of the Connotea site and are vital to anyone conducting research of any kind. This open source tool is one to consider when involved in investigating information that requires citation. Users can organize the work they have completed in their searching and share that information with others while discovering other potentially useful bookmarks through the social aspect of the site: tagging, groups and pages. The functionality of its features frees the user from the burden of labor commonly associated with in-depth research and data gathering.

References

Connotea About Page: http://www.connotea.org/about

Connotea Blog: http://www.connotea.org/blog

Rethlefsen, Melissa L. (2006). Product pipeline: Melissa L. Rethlefsen looks at social reference managers and what they mean for librarians. "Library Journal. 131.17 (Oct.15, 2006): pS14. Literature Resource Center. Gale. FLORIDA STATE UNIV. 15 Oct. 2008

Social Bookmarking Tools (II): http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april05/lund/04lund.html

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connotea

External Links

Connotea: http://connotea.com