REQUIEM FOR THE GETCITED SITE

I wonder how many scholars worldwide noticed, or mourned, the demise earlier this year of the getcited site at http://www.getcited.org. As a repository for references to academic publications with in-site links to citers and cited, getcited hosted 3 million publications by 300 000 authors.

The day dawned when getcited users could no longer log in. Wikipedia confirms that the site is no more, claiming that it had ‘largely been supplanted by other tools including Google Scholar’.

As a confirmed getcited user right up to its disappearance, I maintain that was not the case. Google Scholar’s entries are automatically generated and often contain errors (on matters as basic as author name) which authors cannot correct. Getcited, by contrast, was 100% user-controlled: users created their own entries and could always correct or update them. It even contributed to keeping Google Scholar’s standards up, as each getcited entry automatically generated a Google Scholar entry. Also, getcited grouped entries into categories (book, book chapter, journal article, conference paper, translation, etc), allowing authors to create full and complex overviews of their work.

I found getcited sufficiently useful to enter all of my publications there. I am sure many others did too when the site was at its peak. For a couple of years before it died, getcited seemed to be running on automatic pilot: problems arose with special characters, emails to site management went answered.

I have no information on where getcited was hosted or who managed it, still less on how or why it disappeared, though I suspect it became a living-dead operation and may have finally expired along with its hosting contract. Have all those entries disappeared into cyberspace forever, like Edgar Allan Poe’s hero Roderick Usher’s books and paintings disappearing into the sullen waters of the tarn, or are they miraculously cached on some asteroid of the Internet galaxy? I miss this site, and would be delighted if one day some magnanimous cyberangel revived it!

 

 

 

 

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