Welcome to CiteULike, a social bookmarking tool that allows users to post, share and comment on each other’s links — in this case, citations to journal articles with titles like “Trend detection through temporal link analysis” and “The Social Psychology of Inter- and Intragroup Conflict in Governmental Politics.” It’s a sort of “del.icio.us for academics,” said Kevin Emamy, a representative for the site’s London-based holding company, Oversity Ltd. It started out as a personal Web project in 2004 and grew organically by word of mouth. Today, it has some 70,000 registered users and a million page views a month, he said.

Like other similar sites, CiteULike allows users to register, create profiles and submit links that others can read, comment on, tag with relevant keywords and in turn share again. Moving away from the card-catalog view of scholarship, in which researchers dig through archives of recent and not-so-recent journal databases in sequence, the “social discovery” model, as Emamy describes it, allows colleagues to learn from each other’s bookmarks and potentially collaborate in groups....

“CiteULike is a real pioneer, I think,” said Dan Cohen, the director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, which created Zotero. Cohen noted that on Thursday — this morning — he had a conference call scheduled with CiteULike to “explore ways to work together,” such as the ability to import and export citations between the two interfaces.

The eventual goal, he said, is “the seamless transfer of scholarly resources wherever they may lie” — demonstrated recently by Zotero’s announcement that it was teaming up with the Internet Archive to allow scholars to delve into their hard drives and optically scan their documents for the public domain.