Tuesday, February 10, 2009

CiteHouse as a literature organizer



It's still in a buggy and in a somewhat raw state.  For those of you who are adventurous I'd recommend logging in to http://citehouse.dynalias.com:11795/.  This will give you a good idea of the central concept, workflow and layout of CiteHouse.  There are a few things that it really needs and will soon have:

  1. Citation management!  At the moment there is no importing of articles.  The only way to get your articles in to your account is to ask me.  Having a good range of citation management tools is high up on my list of priorities for obvious reasons.  I will most likely write a browser plugin that will allow you to import articles from your favourite academic search engine/database.  And an upload feature so you can upload your EndNote/Zotero libraries.  Synching with existing applications is also on the cards.
  2. Searching your personal library.  There will be operators you can use such as "author:anderson" or "modified:this-week", and the ability to save these as a dynamic search.
  3. For each article in library, ability to click on link and get: (1) references contained within article, (2) citations to article (3) related articles...or even better, (4) for a particular set of articles, recommended articles that are relevant to the set...which is a great way of becoming familiar with a new field in a short period of time.
  4. Some random numbers will appear in the drop down boxes...ignore these...they are a stop-gap measure.
  5. Beautiful layout.

It is incomplete....there is a huge amount of design decisions that need to be made.  I need feedback and help in making these decisions.  Obviously, I'd like to get feedback early-on in order to make the right decisions before I start to polish CiteHouse.  I appreciate any and all feedback...but there are two types of feedback that are really worth a lot (a) general comments about the core features, and (b) a list of features you'd like to see such that you'd use CiteHouse everyday.


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