At first glance, it seems like a nerdier version of Facebook. There’s the profile picture, the list of interests, the space for your Web site. Most of the members have Ph.D.’s, though, and instead of posting party invites or YouTube videos, their “Recent Activity” is full of academic papers and scholarly treatises.

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.

“Using a tool like CiteULike, researchers (who are finding 99 percent of their journal papers online, probably bypassing the library) can now reach directly into the bookshelves of other researchers in their field (or any other field), anywhere the world, knowing nothing about them other than what they have bookmarked, and see what they are reading right now,” he said.