Mendeley

Hey Everyone!

This week I have been investigating another social bookmarking tool, Mendeley. This tool also enables you, like Endnote to create citations and list of references for the documents, etc. stored within the program. Mendeley claims to be the best tool to manage research through their functions covering organisation, collaboration and discovering new documents (Mendeley 2014). The functions that the tool provides include:

• ·         Citations and bibliographies
• ·         Reading and annotating
• ·         Import Endnote libraries, etc.
• ·         Share notes and references
• ·         Access to documents online, on iPad, iPhone, etc.
• ·         Public groups, networking, search for papers.
• ·         (Mendeley 2014)

I believe that Mendeley is mainly designed for .pdf files for example, journal articles, etc. it is more focused on professional and academic research as you can search for papers that are relevant to research that you are conducting. This tool can be accessed anywhere on your smartphone, iPad, iPhone, online, etc. so that you can access it wherever you are. Also, you can download it onto your desktop, which I have done myself in an easy process to follow.

Mendeley is quite similar to EndNote as you can create citations and bibliographies through the tools. The tool also has a similar layout to EndNote and similar functions in terms of organising references, documents, etc. The tool also provides functions that enable the user to share their documents and references with other people. Also you can access public groups through which you can find out about current research within your area of study as well as being able to find experts in a particular field.

It is easy to get started all you have to do is go to the mendeley website at the following link and enter your email and name, then follow the instructions to create your account and download the program onto your computer. It only took a few minutes and then I was set up to start finding documents that I wanted to add to my library. It is absolutely free which is another benefit of the tool and you can organise your research in the one spot.

http://www.Mendeley.com

So far, in my brief experience with the tool I have been able to import my library from EndNote into my Mendeley library and have added a couple of other documents that I found as well (see screen shot below).

It was easy to do this as they provided clear and easy to understand instructions on how to do this. I think that I would like to investigate the tool further as I have only begun to touch the surface of the tool in my investigation and there are many other functions that I have not tried out myself. Therefore, I would like to try these functions out and become more familiar with the tool so that I can determine whether the tool is likely to be useful for me, although, it does seem to be a good tool for organising research.

In comparison to Diigo, Mendeley appears to be more of an academic tool. It has more functions in terms of being able to create references, etc. Both of them provide social functions and provide reading and annotating as well. I think that both tools are useful and I will have to investigate a bit further to decide which tool I personally would prefer to use.

I have enjoyed looking into social bookmarking tools and I hope to use them to organise my future research for assignments, etc. more effectively so I will never lose an article, or another resource again (which has happened to me a few times when I forget to bookmark them! J ).

Lisette

Reference:

Mendeley 2014, Features, Mendeley, Inc., viewed 31 March 2014, <http://www.mendeley.com/features/>.