=/firstname/all_initials/lastname/=

Example:

=/Michael/ML/DeKay/=

You put this directly into the author field, where you would normally put the author name “as is”. If the article has several authors, you do not need to use special syntax for all of them if you need to protect one. One author with special syntax can happily coexist with other author names being put in “as is” on their respective lines.

Addendum

Fergus from CiteULike was nice enough to stop by and to fix this issue. So you in fact no longer have to add any special syntax. Putting in the author name directly works just fine, even if it contains a capital letter in the middle. Thanks!

CiteULike now offers a feature that makes it much more useful: You can not only upload personal pdf copies of papers, but you can finally share them with others in your group.

The bad

This is only possible for private groups, not for public groups.

The ugly

There is no explicit mention anywhere in your group whether it is “private” or “public”. It seems private groups are those where you have to invite others to join, so check for that criterion. Furthermore, if you’ve already created a group and it is public, you need to e-mail CiteULike for them to change it to private for you (which they promptly do).

Confusingly, the CiteULike interface does not prevent you from presumably posting pdf copies to public groups. I had such a “public” group, which only had me and one other user as member. Erroneously thinking it “private”, for numerous articles, when posting the article I ticked the checkboxes next to my personal library and the group library (both showed up), and I uploaded a pdf and ticked the checkbox “I have the right to distribute this document” which showed up underneath the pdf upload field conveniently labeled “You can upload a PDF to private groups which you are a member of. If you wish to do this, you must indicate that you have the right to do so.” (see image)

However, the pdf files never got posted to the group, since it was in fact “public”. If you do this, no pdf files get posted to the group, but there is no error message alerting you to this fact. So do make sure first that the group is private, and if in doubt, check with CiteULike. If you don’t, there is no easy way to transfer your pdf files from your user account to your group via the regular interface. Instead, the interface asks you to upload a new pdf file for each article, this time to the group, even if you already have a pdf file in your personal library. Copying and duplicating don’t copy or duplicate the pdf file to your group. Luckily, when I ran into this problem, the CiteULike folks were kind and responsive and copied the pdf files to the group library.

Conclusions

1. With the possibility to post pdf files to a private group, CiteULike has made a huge leap in usefulness for academic collaboration.
2. Watch out and make sure your library is private before you upload pdf files to it.
3. CiteULike staff are helpful and responsive, but the web interface still needs some work.

I’ve finally started to look into this and wrote my first Greasemonkey user script. So far, this just works for a single journal. What it does: When I’m browsing the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making (JBDM) via the Penn library proxy server and click on the link to an abstract of an article, the greasemonkey script takes me to the abstract directly on the JBDM website. Once that has loaded, I can then click on my “Post to CiteULike” bookmark and the article gets posted. To get back to browsing JBDM via the Penn proxy, I have to use the dropdown menu of the Firefox back button and navigate a few steps back, to the page before I first loaded the abstract.

I hope to add a few more journals and then post the whole script online for download. I might also try to replace the URL that the abstract link on the Penn proxy JBDM site links to. I’m sure JavaScript can do that, but I don’t have time to figure it out right now.

In the meantime, this is what it looks like:

// ==UserScript==
// @name           PennJBDMabstract2JBDMabstract
// @namespace      http://www.promberger.de
// @description    Goes from penn proxy JBDM abstract to outside abstract
// @include        http://proxy.library.upenn.edu:8125/cgi-bin/abstract/*
// ==/UserScript==

var proxy = new RegExp("proxy.library.upenn.edu:8125\/cgi-bin\/abstract");
var direct = "www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstract";
document.location.href=document.location.href.replace(proxy,direct) ;

Addendum

The script above seems to work not just for JBDM, but for all journals from Wiley Interscience.

Here’s one for journals from Blackwell Synergy:

// ==UserScript==
// @name           blackwell synergy
// @namespace      www.promberger.de
// @include        http://proxy.library.upenn.edu:8147/doi/abs/*
// ==/UserScript==

var proxy = new RegExp("proxy.library.upenn.edu:8147");
var direct = "www.blackwell-synergy.com";
document.location.href=document.location.href.replace(proxy,direct);

Advantages:

• Clear and intuitive layout
• Can import and export BibTeX references.
• Can export EndNote and RSS.
• Lets you manually edit BibTeX citation keys (unlike Connotea).
• Lets you upload a personal .pdf copy.
• Can automatically add a post from a number of publisher’s URLs, via a bookmarklet.
• You can also manually add a citation, in case it is not online (again, seems this is not possible with Connotea).
• The interface for searching your articles is intuitive and fast (for my handful of articles so far), and there’s a nice function for filtering by keywords (tags) either within your own library or for all articles.
• Haven’t tried the function for “groups”, but this could be nice for labs.
• It is free.

Disadvantages:

• It does not recognize doi.
• When I visit a publisher’s URL via the university library website, CiteULike is not able to extract information about that article, even though it can extract the information just fine when I visit the publisher’s URL directly (probably has to do with the library proxy servers?).
• It is not open source