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P2P Bibliographies with Bibster
Noksagt writes "P2P isn't just for government documents anymore! Bibster assists researchers in managing, searching, and sharing bibliographic data in a peer-to-peer network. This project shows great promise to researchers who currently search for citations through centralized servers (Google, Scirus, CiteSeer, ISI. and many others). By making it decentralized, researchers can share bibliographic data with no subscription costs and avoid typing this data in by hand. It can import and export citations using bibtex. The project is GPLed and free clients for windows and Linux are available. There's also a Sourceforge page for Bibster, so you can checkout from the CVS if the Bibster site is slow."
Is it just me or is a scientific database every idiot can add to a bad idea?
I suppose it's the same as a wiki: I too first thought it was the dumbest idea to allow everybody and their dogs to edit webpages, but in any wiki I used, the content always turned out to have a pretty good S/N ratio. I still don't understand why, but wikis work. Just look at wikipedia... So perhaps this will work too...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
What would be really nice is to have the full texts of articles available P2P. That's the advantage of using centralized databases from subscribing locations (like universities): you can sometimes access full text for newer articles with just one click. Swapping full texts would be tremendously useful (and would keep us lazy scientists from having to actually get up and go to the library). Yeah yeah, I'm sure there are copyright issues... but doesn't fair use apply somehow? I'm a psychology research assistant at a major university, and at weekly lab meetings we often send around articles by email for everyone to read and then discuss, and I've never even really thought about copyright of them until now. Isn't open sharing of knowledge at the heart of the scientific endeavor? Oh, and also: it would be awesome if user comments could be added to each citation. Like: "this was an influential paper that opened new directions for research on human memory," etc. Of course, you can also get a ROUGH idea of that kind of thing by how many times a paper's been cited by other papers, as someone else already said.
The next big question is whether or not it's standards based. While it would be surprising if it used Z39.50, it would be a shame if it didn't use SRW and/or CQL.
Especially as NISO is recommending them in their current 'Metasearch Initiative' -- an industry/academic/government cross sector committee with the major players and interested parties for allowing cross searching of bibliographic databases with other sorts of things.
(ObDisc, member of both SRW Editorial Board and Taskgroup 3 of NMSI)
--Azaroth