CiteULike was a web service which allowed users to save and share citations to academic papers.

[2] Based on the principle of social bookmarking, the site worked to promote and to develop the sharing of scientific references amongst researchers.

In the same way that it is possible to catalog web pages (with Furl and delicious) or photographs (with Flickr), scientists could share citation information using CiteULike.

[7] When browsing issues of research journals, small scripts stored in bookmarks (bookmarklets) allowed one to import articles from repositories like PubMed, and CiteULike supported many more.

Users could organize their libraries with freely chosen tags and this produces a folksonomy of academic interests.

[8] Initially, one added a reference to CiteULike directly from within a web browser, without needing a separate program.

For common online databases like PubMed, author names, title, and other details were imported automatically.

[9] These small scripts read the citation information from the web page and imported into the CiteULike database for the currently logged in user.

Sites supported for semi-automatic import included Amazon.com, arXiv.org, JSTOR, PLoS, PubMed, SpringerLink, and ScienceDirect.