One of the hardest (or, as is sometimes preferred, most challenging)  aspects of writing papers and doing research is keeping track of all your reference material. “Where is that quote? In which paper did I read that stereoselectivity is not an important factor in this process?” and on it goes when you’re writing. For a substantive paper you can end up with 50 or more references and I’ve seen some where there are more 100 . For a thesis or a book, you’re looking at hundreds of references.

Since the advent of computers and then the internet, the bar has risen considerably. Finding both the latest and as many references as possible is much easier online than searching library card catalogues and journal indexes manually.  Correspondingly, the expectations are much higher despite the fact that new tools to access references haven’t really kept up. Yes, there are citation management systems but those are an automated version of putting your references on 3″ x 5″ cards and putting them in order (although the automated version will also spit out whichever citation format you request, which is a wonderful thing).

All of this is a preamble to an article, Science enters the age of Web 2.0, by Jason Palmer on BBC News here about some new tools that can help. From the article,

You might think that professional research scientists are at the forefront of what the newest tools of the internet can provide in terms of collaboration and the discovery of knowledge.

After all, they’re frequently plonked down in front of their computers, with all that the web has to offer them easily at hand, right?

Well, sort of.

“Scientists are all about doing new things but actually we’re very conservative about the way that we do them,” said Cameron Neylon, a senior scientist for biomolecular sciences at the Science and Technology Facilities Council.

Palmer goes on to discuss the new tools and how they help multiple researchers in varying disciplines spread out amongst several timezones to work together as well as answer some of the questions I posed earlier.