I am (was?) a Connotea user (my Connotea bib reference still sits on the right column of this blog). Today, as of writing a report, I tried to import my references from Connotea… The authors of many papers are simply not there. I tried RIS and bibtex (what I use) export, nothing. The authors are not there (I inspected the bibtex export). Yes, maybe I should have checked the quality of the citation, but the point of selecting a DOI (which I always did when clicking my “Add to Connotea” bookmarlet) is not to take away the burden of specifying all important details?

I don’t really like to write on the negative, but, in fact, I had a few more problems with services from the Nature Publishing Group:
1. Performance and downtime: Sometimes to submit a citation takes ages, or the service is down (although, regarding downtime, it seems to be getting better).
2. Postgenomic: When I tried to use it, it was mostly down. Want anedoctical evidence? If you search now (as of the posting date of this entry) for postgenomic on google, the cached page says: “Unable to select database”, nothing more.
3. Postgenomic again: A few months I submitted my blog. I got no answer at all.

Well, let me go back to my report and to manually correct entries downloaded from Connotea into JabRef (JabRef, by the way, can download PubMed entries automatically and correctly).

Updated with screenshot of Google cache (click the thumbnail for full sized screenshot):

Google cache of postgenomic

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3 Comments to "Pissed with Connotea"

  • Stew said: On 10/08/2007 at 9:33 am

    Hi T,

    Short answer: sorry… you’re listed now!

    Long answer:

    http://www.ghastlyfop.com/blog/2007/10/connotea-postgenomic-complaints.html

  • Ian Mulvany said: On 10/09/2007 at 10:30 am

    Connotea speed issues,

    Hi Tiago,

    I’m the product dev manager for Connotea. I hear what you are saying about the speed. The reason the service is slow is probably twofold. We calculate privacy each time a request is made, and we don’t do caching that well at the moment.

    We have an extra box that we are trying to fit in to help speed things up and we are looking at the speed issue as well. We basically have a three step plan for solving the problem:

    1. Add more hardware now

    2. Do some back-end work to improve responsiveness

    3. Experiment with moving to Ec2.

    I’m hoping that 1 will be done in the next couple of weeks. The other two fixes will take longer as we are working on some other stuff first.

    I know that it sucks at the moment, but it will get better.

    Your point about the DOI import/export is also important. You are right and it should just work. We are re-desiging the db tables in order to fix buggotea. One of the things about conntoea is that an entry is stored once in the db and bookmarks are mirrors of this entry. We have been having issues where the post item is defined by the uri, and there are multiple instances of the same paper represented in the DB, each having a different uri. If someone creates a post item, anyone bookmarking the same entity will inherit the meta-data accosicated with the same post. We can go through the db and re-collect citation information if we have a better parser for getting this data. When we roll out the fix to the duplicate paper multiple uri issue then we will do this as a matter of course, and I will make sure that we fix the problem that you have been having with your doi-format not getting sufficient citation information for you. This should happen within the next two weeks, hopefully, or soon after that.

  • Adrian Heilbut said: On 10/10/2007 at 5:49 am

    I greatly prefer citeUlike - http://www.citeulike.org

Please share your thoughts