A recent post on the philos-l email list (a vital source of all things news-like in philosophy I find) mentioned useful online tools for scholars.  Aside from things provided by google (see the previous post I made on this) there are a number of other tools and the two I want to mention today are Cite-U-Like and Netvibes.

Netvibes is a service that’s provided in a number of places nowadays.  It’s a single page where you can add or subtract modules that include things like feedreaders for keeping in touch with those interesting blogs. Google does a similiar thing with its’ personalised homepages and if you’re a student at Greenwich University then the new portal system may cover all you need in this area.  RSS feeds can of course be easily integrated into Firefox anyway and come up as buttons in the ‘Bookmarks Toolbar’ so it may be that the netvibes thing proves slightly redundant in the end, we’ll see.  It will depend in large part of what other modules they offer I expect.  I’m going to be testing it for the next while so any other comments on that welcome.

The Cite-U-Like service, on the other hand, looks like an absolutely vital integration of browser and research tools. You just add a bookmark to your browser and then when you come across a page useful for your academic research you can press this link and add it to your citeulike library.  It registers pages from peer-reviewed journals and so is able to seperate out the ‘definitely ok’ from the ‘slightly dubious’ and there’s also a ‘watch’ service which enabels you to watch the contents of various journals, as well as upload copies of the articles for your own private use, which means you can access these things from any web-browser – useful for that problem of keeping stuff together as you move form campus to home.  The watch service covers various journals as well as other citeulike participants, so you can also watch the citation library of others with research interests close to your own.  I’d recommend everyone get a citeulike page setup asap …