It’s time to change the way we do research
The firm and highlighted
statement that caught my eyes when first came to this site was the firm
statement “It’s time to change the way
we do research”. So what is it all about and what can Mendeley offer?
Description
Mendeley is a free reference
manager and academic social
network that can help you organize your research,
collaborate with others online, and discover the latest research. It is
a 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, OS and Linux) with Mendeley Web, an
online social network for researchers.
Mendeley users are allowed to store all basic citation data on its server. Storing copies of documents is at the
user's choice and discretion. Mendeley
provides the users with 2GB of free web storage space by the registration time,
and upgrades with a cost.
Features
Some common features of Mendeley include:
- Automatically generate bibliographies
- Collaborate easily with other researchers online
- Easily import
papers from other research software
- Find relevant papers based on what you’re reading
- Access your papers from anywhere online
- Read papers on the go, with our new iPhone app
As a free reference manager, Mendeley is fully compatible
with:
- · Windows Word 2003, 2007, 2010
- · Mac Word 2008, 2011
- · LibreOffice
- · BibTeX
To use Mendeley, you will start with
downloading it and install it on your laptop. You can also install the Word
Plugin once you are on your Mendeley page and start creating your bibliography.
Video
Tutorials
Mendeley already provides very thorough tutorial videos to walk its users through the steps of using the tool. I don't see the reason for doing this over again, instead, I highlighted the videos that I hope you might find useful for your Mendeley exploration.
Strength
and weakness
On the weakness side, I noticed there were not many
color choices to highlight the PDF (users might want to color code the
materials by topics or by importance, etc. But I guess this might not be a big
serious drawback.
I found some more critical feedback from Mendeley on the website. For example, Mendeley should
enable the built-in PDF reader to recognize annotations (notes, highlights,
etc) made in external PDF readers (such as Acrobat and Evince); assign a label
in “All Documents” section for each PDF to show the folder that it belongs to; option
to show only the highlights of a paper, instead of the whole paper, or
synchronize Mendeley with one Google scholar account.
Tool recommendation & educational scenarios
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