see also Citation management and Research for librarians – portal
“…Mendeley is a great tool for people interested in science.”- Mendeley reviews
Mendeley is a popular, new web service that allows academic researchers and faculty to organize their research free-of-charge online (for now, at least) and store documents (with seemingly unlimited storage). As a web 2.0 tool, Mendeley facilitates social networking, collaboration and sharing information within research networks. Its website features other researchers’ private and public journal collections and is generally regarded as more impressive in functionality than Zotero. Here is the Mendeley blog.
- Basics of downloading and using Mendeley
- Getting Started with Mendeley: includes links to support 13pg. manual
In 2007-2008, Mendeley raised early funding to help it achieve its vision of becoming the “Last.fm for research”. Mendeley Desktop was created to help researchers organize their work locally on a freely-downloaded client that is extremely easy to use. It is called a “cross-platform desktop application” and extracts metadata, full-text and cited references from papers for loading into the web version. Similar to other bibliographic software tools, Mendeley eliminates data input and enables researchers to manage, tag, search full-text, cite and share papers within their own online Mendeley library. In addition, it provides social features not found in other tools such as word clouds, trending topics in papers and most-cited authors. Mendeley Web displays authors, journals and tags and includes quality rating metrics and recommendation mechanisms.
- free, downloadable desktop client (even though a private company, Mendeley is in development and currently free of charge)
- Mendeley is planning a premium subscriber feature and moving towards an iTunes-like model of payment & access
- web-based component called Mendeley Web; allows syncing so you can access your pdf library from any computer
- social networking tools within tool to connect to researchers
- extensive list of citation styles http://www.mendeley.com/citationstyles/
- uses Citation Style Language (CSL) standard — an open XML standard to format citations and bibliographies
- automatic extraction of metadata from PDF
- back-up possible across multiple computers
- digital document viewer has sticky note functions, text highlighting and full-screen reading
- full-text searching across papers
- smart filtering, tagging and file renaming
- citation formatting and bibliography generation for Microsoft Word and OpenOffice
- imports documents and papers from external websites (e.g. PubMed, Google Scholar, Arxiv, etc.) via browser bookmark
- extracts metadata (author, title, publication info, etc.) and creates a bibliographic record for each paper in your Mendeley library
- Mendeley grabs citation information from pdfs, whereas Zotero grabs citation information from webpages
- online pdf viewer and other cool features that will make managing papers simpler
- The sharing and collaboration features on Mendeley are superior to Zotero
- there are notable differences in development philosophies
- Zotero is ‘open source’ (developers share code, so many people can contribute) whereas Mendeley is closed, commercial product
- Mendeley is still in beta so developers are constantly improving it
- Zotero can import pdf documents, grabs text & searches Google scholar for document metadata
- 2Collab.com
- Papers: your personal library of research
- ScrapBook – similar to Zotero but no bibliographic functions
- WizFolio – share research papers, patents, documents, books, YouTube videos, web snippets
- Zotero – free easy-to-use Firefox extension to help manage and cite sources
See also Bibliographic citation software
- Fitzpatrick J. Mendeley Manages Your Documents on Your Desktop and in the Cloud.
- Hull D, Pettifer R, Kell B. Defrosting the digital library: bibliographic tools for the next generation web. PLoS computational biology 2008;4 (10): e1000204.
- Henning V, Reichelt. Mendeley – A Last.fm for Research? 2008;7:327–328.
- EndNote, RefWorks, Zotero, Mendeley – http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/PUBL/endnote.html
Yvonne Chan
lse721
Thanks, Dean.
A couple points to mention regarding the comparison to Zotero. Mendeley actually works well with Zotero, as the support import from Humanities databases is a little better on Z’s end. Mendeley did start from a closed source background, but they’re working on projects that will be community managed and make it easier for researchers to organize and share their information, whatever tool they use as their main application. For example, we’re working on a citation style editor as a community project (apologies, I don’t have the URL for the code repository at hand right now). Additionally, we’re making rich statistics and data available via API for developers to work with. The idea is most certainly not to get people’s data and then lock them in and charge them to access it.
Thanks for the thorough review and don’t hesitate to get in touch with further questions.
Realtime Twitter results for giustini
1. @laurissagann @giustini @mrgunn Also, the citations I’ve imported seem buggy and inconsistent, issues with duplicates, but I think Mendeley has potential. 25 minutes ago from TweetDeck
2. @laurissagann @giustini @mrgunn They need batch import, automatic syncing, don’t want to download client & their import button only works in certain dbs. 26 minutes ago from TweetDeck
3. What areas should Mendeley work on? I’m not wild about having to download the client or that they may monetize in the future about 3 hours ago from web
4. @laurissagann @giustini Mendeley is good but it still has a lot of work to do.
“Mendeley is going the direction that I like and want. The interface is much easier for me to use mainly and it’s a standalone program with a web interface for when I need that sort of thing. That’s not to say Mendeley is perfect either. Since I’ve been using it the PDF metadata extraction can be erroneous and most frustratingly it crashes on me when trying to upload PDFs. I’ve about got all of them uploaded finally but it’s taken me several days of closing/reopening Mendeley to get it done. Just one niggle, Mendeley is free as in beer but not free as in speech. There is a feedback suggestion to publish Mendeley desktop under the GPL here.”
On the Pro side:
Anyone can use Mendeley, as you’re not tied to a certain browser as with Zotero or a certain operating system as with Papers.
You get something back for your work with Mendeley because not only does it organize, but it can help you discover papers and colleagues through recommendations and research article stats.
It’s easier to share papers, because when you share in Mendeley, the tags, notes, and metadata is shared along with the paper. Email only gets you the PDF.
Cons:
It’s still in beta, so there are bugs
It’s cross-platform, so the developer effort is spread more thinly. It’s hard to look as native as Papers on the Mac, for example.
It doesn’t yet support as many humanities databases, as does Zotero. That should be changing soon, though.
Not being entirely open source is a drawback too, but they’re actively trying to mitigate this by providing the API so there’s no data lock-in.
Hello,
if you like mendeley our software “sciplore mindmapping” might be interesting for you. sciplore mindmapping is a mind mapping application that allows you to integrate your pdfs and references with mind maps. the big advantage of this approach is that you do not only have a list of your PDFs but a mind map in which you can add additional information and arrange PDFs more flexible. And in case you really like Mendeley, you even can use Mendeley in addition to SciPlore MindMapping.
For a short demonstration of sciplore mindmapping see
http://www.youtube.com/v/jRHqLktIMWw&hl=en_GB&fs=1&rel=0&hd=1
To try the software (open source, Java): http://www.sciplore.org/software/sciplore_mindmapping/
and to read about how to write a phd thesis (or academic papers in general) with sciplore mindmapping see: http://sciplore.org/blog/2010/03/02/how-to-write-a-phd-thesis/
Looks like Mendeley is written primarily in Python, so diluting developer effort for cross-platform delivery isn’t much of an issue.