Today, my heart skipped a beat. In seraching for other blogs on cardiac electrophysiology, I came upon a service called Cite-U-Like.

This is huge. HUGE. This is Del.icio.us for scientific papers. You can watch tags like, “electrophysiology” or “defibrillation.” You can watch authors. You can watch journals. You can add articles just by clicking a little “Add to Cite-U-Like” bookmarklet when you’re looking at the PubMed citation. It all has RSS feeds built in. You can import and export in EndNote and BibTeX formats. I imported our huge lab bibtex file, and the author/editor page is a who’s who of people that our lab has cited since… ever. Those we cite more are displayed in a larger font.

This is the human filter for the techno-literary deluge that is composed of all of the articles published every week in academic journals. In less than a year, I predict it will no longer be necessary to watch tables-of-contents as I do now with the major cardiac electrophysiology journals. It won’t be necessary to pore over so many abstracts, trying to figure out which papers to spend your valuable time reading. The community at large will do this collectively, resulting in less work for everyone. Those people most familiar with a particular lab, author, or subtopic will note the paper’s arrival, bookmark / read / tag it, and alert the rest of the world, or at least the part watching the subject on Cite-U-Like.

I’ve been wishing for something like this for a good six months or more. I can’t believe it already existed.

I’m planning on spending a significant portion of the rest of today figuring out how to use this thing to it’s ultimate ability. Well, what are you waiting for? Go tag your articles!