A brief and unscientific survey of social bookmarking buttons provided by journal websites. Take with pinch of salt and/or tongue in cheek.
 PLoS get it. As you'd expect. |
 BMC get it too. |
 Even ACS kind of get it. |
 OUP get it to a degree. |
 Someone doesn't get it. |
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I know, all bookmarking services provide their own tools, such as bookmarklets. However, I suspect that a button is more convenient for many people: it’s a courtesy and an advertisement for social bookmarking and online reference management tools.
So NPG: is it “we promote sharing” or “we promote sharing so long as you use our service?”
What You're Doing Is Rather Desperate 
You know, this has come before and we were never sure that people actually *wanted* to Digg, Facebook-share or Stumbleupon research papers. ;)
News stories and features are different:
http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090702/full/news.2009.617.html
That said nowadays it’s expected though, you’re right. Plus there are definitely PLoS ONE (as an example) papers on Digg – though lots of them are submitted by the same person – so maybe there’s a demand.
I wonder if there is a way of getting hold of data on how many people are using different bookmarking services for papers. Citeulike/Connotea/Delicious ought to be reasonably straightforward but how many papers are share on Facebook/LinkedIn. How would you even get such numbers?
Probably have to check publisher referrer logs. Would be an interesting exercise.
It would be interesting to know how many people use each service. I’m not interested in saving papers to Digg, Facebook or Twitter, but would have thought that buttons should always be present for Connotea, CiteULike and Delicious – and perhaps now, Mendeley.