Tuesday, May 04, 2010

Google Bibliography?

No, Google Bibliography is not a real product. I really wish it was though. I am currently starting to collect documents for my doctoral dissertation proposal and I keep running into the same issue over and over again, redundancy. I am absolutely fearful that my EndNote library is going to get squashed by any number of possible deaths. Call me paranoid, but when it comes to data, well...ok I guess I'm paranoid.
Large journal sources such as ACM already have a system for exporting to any number of citation storage packages, including the ever popular EndNote, here is the issue I have though, EndNote does a great job of keeping my references together, but does so in such an inelegant way. After 3 years of Gmail, 3 years of Google Docs, and access to a lot of these services on the fly via mobile, I came to rely on elegance of Google software, even more than that elegance, I rely on the cloud to store the most critical information as a backup device. The culmination of my academic career is more than "critical" to me.

What to do? I could just continue to use EndNote X3 which my university makes available to me for free. I then have the issue of storing my library, and all pdf articles associated with it in a central repository and "syncing" them. I use multiple computers for this process, so now I am almost tied to those little flash drives for my sync. Ug. I suppose I could "upload" my library files to Google Docs as a backup, but that again seems "inelegant". Why could I not have a solution where I can store, modify, read, relate, tag, and organize my citations in the cloud, as an integrated service with the apps I already rely on from Google?
What I want: I want a service which ties in to a document storage package like Google docs, can easily be updated like Google Bookmarks for Scholar searches, easily tagged (like all Google products). I want a Google citation database! In the cloud, massive storage, tags, easily searchable (search through the pdf uploads too), and linked to Google Talk for collaboration. I think this need fits right in the middle between Google Docs and Google Apps.

Please don't make me carry all my research and literature on a flash drive...please?


No comments: