“Organize...share...discover” — those are the buzzwords of Connotea, a reference-management service with a community-orientated approach aimed at meeting the needs of academics.
Developed by Nature Publishing Group, setting up a Connotea account is free and easy to do. Once you've spotted a paper that you want to bookmark (or indeed any other web page that interests you) you simply store it in your personalized library. At the click of a mouse, the relevant information about the paper is added to your library, which you can access from any computer, wherever in the world you might happen to be. You can also manage your references by adding tags — for example, 'RNA' or 'networks' — to create an index of topics that you're interested in.
Connotea is also a social tool, designed to inspire new ideas by allowing users to share their information and learn from others. You can access a list of hot topics or recent additions, and your choices in turn will be added to the communal collection. On the other hand, if you're researching a project that you'd rather keep to yourself or to a small group of collaborators, you can mark your entries as 'private' or define the group you want to share with.
Connotea also has a range of other attractions — such as the ability to use RSS feeds and import and export references to and from EndNote — and new features are regularly added to the site. So, whether you simply want to organize your reading or are more technologically inclined, Connotea will almost certainly have something for you.
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Flintoft, L. A social approach to reading. Nat Rev Genet 6, 726 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrg1720
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nrg1720
