RSS Feeds... Citation managers... the missing link
I've been wondering lately, as I've spent a little time going back and forth here between two diferent types of applications associated with information literature - RSS feed readers and Citation management software - what it will take to link these two types of applications together to create a truly powerful tool for researchers, academics, scholars, journalists, or even the lay person who is interested in learning and discussing a specific topic, to provide and manage information.
If you're not quite following my line of thinking, or don't know enough about these types of tools, I'll give a little background. If you're on the web these days and reading news, articles, i.e. anything published and generally attributable to a journal and/or author, you've seen the little orange 'RSS" or "XML" boxes at the bottom or side of the page. If you use them, then you may know that an aggregator is a tool or application (or web page) dedicated to aggragating or pulling together timely feeds from a source into your reading tool. MyYahoo, and Google Reader are two good examples of web pages that function as RSS aggregators. There's a whole host Aggregator/Reader applications such as Feedreader and RSSBandit are examples of app readerds. Regardless of what tool you use, the point here is that these tools are supposed to save you the trouble of hunting around the web and checking for new articles (or blog updates) from time to time from all your commonly read sources of information. Selective feeds help narrow in the topics such that you don't get alerted and fed every single news article that gets posted to CNN but rather a more specific topic such as "Technology news." It's also worth noting that feeders don't just feed out text articles but can also say, podcasts or videocasts. If you "subscribe" to a podcast in iTunes, iTunes is functioning as your aggregator.
So basically what the reader/aggregators here do is collect (potential) articles of interest to you. The "portal" people saw this as a way of customizing the information that you get on your home page to be stuff that you'd likely find interesting.
At the other end, scholars and researchers have a habit of reading a lot of articles and information related to a specific set of ideas and/or problems that they're interested in. Often these come to them in journal articles, books, serials, and other types of sources dependent on the type of academic discipline that they'reworking in. Similarly, many journalists, being writers themselves, are voracious readers and researchers gathering background information and sources to synthesize in their reporting. In the past, it was up to the individual to devise a system of remembering what they read, where they read it, and maybe keep some notes on the matter for recall when they later needed to cite their source. From working with some academics who have been at this for 50+ years, I know some who keep stacks and stacks of notecards that they file with records of every article that they have read important to their research or work. Others may keep a running list in a word document or excel spreadsheet that they have been adding to for years and years.
Enter the Citation or Reference Management software applications also known as Bibliographic management solutions. When I first started using EndNote about 6 years ago, it was an application that sort of pluged into Microsoft Word as something of a side-database that allowed you to create entries and categorize citations that you had read. As you wrote your paper or article, you could "cite" or reference articles to support or provide evidence for your arguments. At the conclusion of writing your article, you could, with a few clicks, build your bibliography and it would get added to the end of your article automatically. In a few years, thanks to a bunch of librarians and Information Technologists, the Citation management standard has gotten better and better. Even though there are disparities between some of the popular Citation manages such as EndNote and RefWorks (worth noting too that EndNote is an application tool and RefWorks is web based), journal publishers who provide their articles online (both public and fee-for use journals) nowadays provide "citation links" that import the citation directly into your citation manager - no longer do you have to retype the whole citation and make sure you get the author's name spelled correctly, etc. etc. With a click of the mouse, it's in your manager waiting for you to later cite in your article and build into the bibliography.
So at this end, what citation managers do is help organize the content that you have read so that you can recall and reference them in your own writing later on. For the individual who may read dozens of articles a day or hundreds a week, this is a tremendous time saving tool. Even if you're not a writer yourself, just having a tool that organizes anything that you have read into the ideas and categories that you are thinking about is powerful and a great tool for shaping your thoughts and ideas. While citation standards tend to be most important at the scholarly level right now, where the scientific method demands that claims should be verified and referenced, you can create a citiaton i.e. bibliographical entry for any source of information.
I tend to think of Citaiton Managers still as a bit clunky. Feed readers, also a bit of "here today, gone tomorrow" in the way that they present information - readers tend to push out stuff based on volume so you can lose an article if you wait too long between times you check your reader. So thinking as a consumer of information who consumes a lot in a breadth of disparate categories, and as someone who constantly needs to reference back to stuff that I've read about a day, a week, a month, or year or so ago, I tend to think that the builders of these types of tools really need to get together to build a true personal information management tool which simplifies the process of aggregating as well as maintaining and recalling citations to that information. This would be a tremendous boon to academics, scholars, researchers, and scholars.
Blogged with Flock
