CiteULike

» see citeulike.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

citeulike's good years line up almost exactly with my time at university, which is the part that makes it awkward to write about honestly. reference management in a turkish engineering department that decade meant bibtex if you were writing in latex, or endnote if your lab held a license. the social layer was the entire idea of citeulike, and the social layer was the part nobody around me had any use for.

richard cameron put it up in november 2004, about a year after delicious had shown what social bookmarking looked like for ordinary web pages. the mechanism was the same one. you kept a bookmarklet in your browser bar, and when a paper you wanted was on screen you clicked it. citeulike went and read the page, worked out the title and the authors by itself, and dropped a proper citation into your library without you typing anything.

it knew how to do that for pubmed and arxiv first, then for a long tail of publishers past them, which is more work than it sounds like because every journal marks up a paper differently and all of them redesign. by 2006 there was a company, oversity ltd., set up in the uk to keep the thing running.

the reason people cared was what happened after you saved. your tags were public unless you hid them, so a tag on a paper was a small public statement about what you were working on, and clicking a tag showed you everybody else who had made it. that produced a folksonomy of a research field, assembled by the people actually reading in it rather than by a subject librarian.

~ the dossier ~

~ the bookmarklet ~

the software was written in tcl with plugins contributed in python and perl, and the data sat in postgres. the code itself was closed, which annoyed exactly the constituency that used the site, but the dataset the users built was released into the public domain. that combination is unusual enough to be worth stating plainly: the company kept its own work and gave away everyone else's contributions to everyone.

groups let a lab keep a shared library. export went out as bibtex or ris, so you were never locked in, and you could point zotero at it. the service was free, run independently of any publisher, and paid for by a gold tier and not much else. that arrangement worked for a decade and then stopped working, which is a sentence you could write about a great many good things from that period of the web.

~ the notice ~

on 19 february 2019 a post went up saying citeulike would close. the wording was unusually plain about why: the costs of providing it, and the fact that none of the people behind it had any time left to put into maintenance. users had until 30 march to download their libraries, gold subscriptions past that date were refunded pro rata, and that was it. no acquisition and no press.

the bibtex export came out clean. the pdfs people had uploaded into their libraries did not, so researchers spent february writing scrapers against a site that was about to disappear, which is the standard closing ritual of any service that held things people cared about. the last working snapshot in the internet archive is dated 28 march. the day after that, nothing.

~ what the domain was worth ~

citeulike.org went to a godaddy expiry auction and closed on 13 december 2020 at thirty-six thousand dollars. nobody paid that for the name. fifteen years of academics linking to their libraries had left roughly fourteen million backlinks from more than fifteen thousand referring domains, and a domain with that history will rank for things a new one cannot.

so the shape of the ending is that the citations were exported by whoever bothered, the community evaporated into mendeley and zotero, and the only asset with a market price was the residue of everybody's linking. the papers are all still findable. the record of who was reading what, alongside whom, in 2008, is not.

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