Hopefully, this isn’t the first time you’ve heard of CiteULike, but chances are, if you’re like me, you haven’t actually tried it. After reading an article about CiteULike in insiderhighered.com last week though, I knew I had to give it another try. While CiteULike doesn’t have an exciting interface (but then the other social bookmarking giant, del.icio.us doesn’t either), it is chock full of features for the more serious researcher.

Yes, CiteULike allows you to bookmark websites (like del.icio.us); however, the emphasis here is really on tagging articles and then sharing them with your fellow scholars. “Your fellow scholars” can be as broad as librarians all over the country, or as narrow as the people in your department you’re working on a project with. It’s kind of like sharing your EndNote or Refworks library, only way easier.

Speaking of EndNote or Refworks, you can either import your EndNote library into CiteULike or import your CiteULike library into EndNote. Pretty nice, since CiteULike isn’t really a bibliography creator yet. However, word on the street is they are in talks with Zotero, so who knows.

Another nifty feature of CiteULike that I hadn’t previously remembered is the ability to scan journal table of contents from within CiteULike. For many users, this may be much easier than finding their way into something like Ingenta.

Finally, this is a social bookmarking tool, so of course there are discussion forums and shared tags you can use to find other topics of interest to you. Try searching for libraries and see if there are any groups you might be interested in joining.