Mendeley

Draft

Introduction

“Mendeley is a gratis, proprietary desktop and web program for managing and sharing research papers, discovering research data and collaborating online. It combines Mendeley Desktop, a PDF and reference management application (available for Windows, Mac and Linux) with Mendeley Web, an online social network for researchers.” (Wikipedia, retrieved April 2010).

Features

According to Wikipedia:

• Mendeley Desktop runs on Windows, Mac and Linux.
• Automatic extraction of metadata from PDF papers.
• Back-up and synchronization across multiple computers and with a private online account.
• PDF viewer with sticky notes, text highlighting and full-screen reading.
• Full-text search across papers.
• Smart filtering, tagging and automatic PDF file renaming.
• Citations and bibliographies in Microsoft Word and OpenOffice.
• Import of documents and research papers from external websites via a browser bookmarklet.
• BibTeX export/file sync
• Shared collections to collaboratively tag and annotate research papers.
• Social networking features (newsfeeds, comments, profile pages, etc.).
• Usage-based readership statistics about papers, authors and publications.

Tricks

Mendeley does not allow importing bibliographies (i.e. lists of references) that are in text or wordprocessor or PDF format.

To import a list of references:

• Create an account with wizfolio (similar software). The limited free version is good enough for this task.
• Create a collection and keep it selected.
• Add button -> from clip board
  • Wizfolio now will attempt to find the bibliographic data. For a larger list, this will take some time.
• Export to some Mendeley compatible format
• Import to Mendeley.

Links

• Mendeley home page