I have been a devotee of social bookmarking tool delicious since 2007 and now have nearly 4000 items tagged. Although the ‘before’ and ‘after’ photos (slide 17) in my July 2008 presentation Knowing where it’s at: find it? flag it? share it? (or how delicious saved my life) were staged for effect, the ability to accumulate links to resources online rather than generate piles on (unread) papers in my office has been a genuine revelation.

Alongside delicious, I also dabbled briefly with Connotea, the online reference management tool from the Nature stable. It has the same potential as delicious for user-generated tags, but at the time I couldn’t really see what additional value it was adding and I let my interest wither, electing instead to use delicious alone for all of my bookmarks, including journal articles.

More recently, I’ve been persuaded by a colleague to take a close look at rival social citation application citeulike. This time around I think I get it. One of the features that really appeals is the potential to import comprehensive bibliographic information armed only with the Digital Object Identifier (DOI). With journals making the DOI of articles increasingly obvious on their websites and in table of contents alerts, this becomes a very straightforward way to collate large quantities of metadata whilst retaining the capability to tag a paper with whatever keywords reflect its relevance to you.

In truth, I have not conducted a rigorous side-by-side comparison of citeulike v connotea (or any of the other similar tools). I am quite sure, for example, that they all have the potential to assimilate bibliographic details armed only with the DOI. For the foreseable future I will continue to tag journal articles using delicious. However, this feature of citeulike, couple with the capabililty to establish shared libraries of articles relevant to members of a particular list, has persuaded me to also give the latter a prolonged trial.

Appropriate citation of source documents is a key element in all academic writing. As anyone involved in the teaching of undergraduates will know, however, suitable ways of organising reference lists, and conventions for highlighting within the new text the points at which the sources have been used, are not always intuitive.

Colleagues and students may therefore be interested in an online tutorial about referencing that has recently been launched at the University of Leicester.

The student reference guide is the latest online tutorial produced at Leicester

It is very clear that different subjects have their own discipline-specific rules governing citation and referencing. Developed as a project of GENIE, the Genetics CETL, the referencing style is contextualised for students in the Biological Sciences.

The tutorial has evolved from a need identified by both staff and students. The team was convened by Raymond Dalgleish and the bulk of the graft in producing the tutorial was undertaken by Nicola Suter-Giorgini. One of the tensions has been to distinguish necessary aspects of a reference scheme from individual preferences about ‘the best way’ for citation to be undertaken. We are sure that the current version has scope for improvement, and suggestions would be gratefully received.

The new tutorial is a useful addition to a growing collection of online tutorials to aid students in different aspects of writing. An earlier tutorial, Don’t cheat yourself, was originally developed by Stuart Johnson for students in the biosciences. A range of versions with different subject-specific examples are now available.

"Don't cheat yourself" has proven to be a popular tutorial dealing with the issue of plagiarism

The name of the blog has its origins in lectures I give on referencing for university assignments.  Not surprisingly, undergraduates sometime struggle to recognise that papers published in certain journals are deemed more worth that articles appearing in ‘lesser’ publications.  To avoid potential offence to any particular periodical I would stress that “An article appearing in Nature is generally considered more authoritative than one published in the Journal of the Left-handed Biochemist“.   As of now, the latter is no longer fictional; the sentiment, however, is probably still true.