Bibster introduces a system which assists researchers in managing, searching, and sharing bibliographic data in a peer-to-peer network. The advantage of the system is it provides the possibility to search on a distributed peer-to-peer network. It provides an easy way to share data with other researchers. In the everyday life of researchers, one has to search for publications or their correct bibliographic metadata. Currently, people search with engines like Google and CiteSeer, via university libraries. Bibster targets a decentralized knowledge sharing environment that allows researchers to a) easily share bibliographic data, b) save work in trying to finding bibliographic data, c) avoid re-typing this data by hand. Bibster builds on the fact that many researchers keep lists of bibliographic data that they must laboriously maintain manually, for which they do not have an easy overview and that has varying data quality. At the same time many researchers are willing to share these resources if they do not have to invest work in doing so.
Bibster provides the ability to search and to share bibliographic data using P2P technologies while giving researchers immediate search facilities for their own bibliography data. Bibster is free and can be downloaded directly here.