Why I Still Don't Use Connotea

Rich Apodaca — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 12:17:00 -0400

Like most scientists, I have a collection of hardcopy journal articles. After they sit on my desk for awhile, I sort them into folders. Each folder has a label such as "dihydroxylation", "olefin metathesis", or "InChI". This system is nothing more than a small ontology. It does the job of building a top-level index of my papers, but it's not nearly as effective as it could be.

There are many problems with ontology. For example, the world changes; I decide to add just one aminohydroxylation paper to the "dihydroxylation" folder and before I know it there are five others in there. Most papers require multiple categories; should I file that metathesis paper under "ring closing", "ruthenium", or "nobel"?

Some time ago, Nature Publishing Group launched Connotea, a service designed to do for scientific papers what del.icio.us does for hyperlinks. CiteULike is a similar service. Both services abandon heirarchical classification in favor of tags - short text descriptions that can be applied to one or more articles. The possibilities of harnessing the collective intelligence of your fellow scientists through these services are tantalizing. And the ability to finally do away with hardcopy journal articles seems liberating.

I think both Connotea and CiteULike are great services, but I still continue to use my horrible system of physical papers and physical folders. And I know I'm not alone. Maybe the thought of transcribing my massive collection of paper into a system like Connotea gives me just the excuse I need to avoid doing it. Maybe I just like being able to browse the articles in these folders while looking for new ideas. Increasingly, I've been turning directly to services like SciFinder and Google to track down a paper, even if I know it's in my collection. So maybe my collection of hardcopy articles just isn't as useful as it once was.

Successful information systems demonstrate a concrete payoff that is much higher than the price of admission. As anyone who uses Linux or Mac OS X can tell you, technical superiority alone is not enough to make people switch. Although Connotea could no doubt make the management of my personal collection of articles easier, the price is simply too high to justify the effort.

Image Credit: Jean Ruaud

"Why I Still Don't Use Connotea" by chupvl at gmail.com

Sat, 24 Mar 2007 08:39:43 -0400

I am do exactly the same, I don't use nor Connotea neither any other article-tracking software/service.

So, the problem is - Publishing House don't want to make pdf of articles trackable because of payment they get for your new downloads (even if you have a subscription).

I've read a copuple of articles concerning the tracability of the PDF files with chemical info (JChiCS I think)

"Why I Still Don't Use Connotea" by Bill

Thu, 22 Mar 2007 17:30:52 -0400

I put all my new stuff in Connotea. I'm never going to input the info from my pile of printouts either, but like you I tend to use Google (Scholar) or PubMed to grab a new pdf rather than search the pile anyway. So I figure that anything new, and anything from the pile that I actually use, will go into Connotea.

I'm hoping that eventually, by carefully tagging each paper according to the molecules it talks about, I'll be able to do something clever with the information contained in my tag set.

Depth-First: Why I Still Don't Use Connotea

Why I Still Don't Use Connotea

"Why I Still Don't Use Connotea" by chupvl at gmail.com

"Why I Still Don't Use Connotea" by Bill