Apr 10, 2009
CiteULike Oddity
This is just a little annoyance of mine, but it’s something that’s been grating on me. Recently, I decided to make a concerted effort to use CiteULike as a way to semi-organize the papers I read on the web. (I’m fairly certain that I had a previous account a while back, with quite a few (50, 60) papers in it, but for the life of me I can’t seem to remember/find it.)
Still, that is no reason not to start again. So, I’ve been adding papers, and I noticed something that just bothers me. When you add a paper to CiteULike, you get to “rate” your…enthusiasm about the paper. From “Top priority!” (5 stars) to “I might read it” (2 stars), it’s all good. But then you get to “I don’t really want to read it” and that gives it one star. That one star seems…odd to me.
To me, one star still means it’s a paper I want to read. Maybe it’s in astronomy or some field I don’t know much about, but if I’ve taken the time to press the CiteULike button and save it to my “library”, it seems like the least amount of interest would be “might read it”, not “not gonna do it”[1].
[1] If you heard Dana Carvey when you read that, you are old. I wrote it, so I know I am.
I don’t rate papers. CiteULike scores very high on Google rank, and to someone who doesn’t use CiteULike, the implication of stars is that I am rating the quality of the paper rather than how likely I am to read it. Worse, the default rating is low. I don’t want a friend or someone to see that I’ve rated their paper one star.
Hmm. Never thought about it like that. Smart.
I might go “de-grade” my unread papers now.
Welp, maybe not. I went the other route. Every unread paper is now 5 Stars. I tried adding an “unread” tag, but the “Unread” function of the site only works on the stars.
So, I did the obvious thing, rank all unread articles as 5 stars and then the “Unread” function will work.