Architecture for a Collaborative Research Environment Based on Reading List Sharing

Scholarly research involves a systematic study of information sources in order to establish facts and reach new conclusions. It encompasses survey, analysis, evaluation, and creation as distinct phases that are performed iteratively and often in parallel by accessing a range of local and remote resources. Throughout these activities scholars create collections of relevant work, ranging from publication references to new information acquired through experiments or correspondence with other scholars. We use the term reading list to refer to such collections. Existing software packages or web services for managing publication lists, like CiteULike, lack integration with researchers" workflow which may require access to both desktop and online resources. In this paper we describe the architecture and system design of ScholarLynk, a desktop tagging tool that enables researchers to build and maintain reading lists across distributed data stores, in collaboration with other researchers.