Mendeley is a free (as of April 2013) web-based reference management tool that allows academics and faculty to organize their research on the web, and access it from anywhere. However, Reed Elsevier announced in April 2013 that it had purchased Mendeley for an undisclosed sum which raises the question about its future. In any case, documents in Mendeley can be stored up to a 1GB limit but you can buy additional space if needed. As a web 2.0 tool, Mendeley combines social networking and information-sharing with research networking. Its website features other researchers' journal collections and is regarded as more impressive in functionality than Zotero. Here is the Mendeley blog. In early 2013, it was announced that Elsevier would buy Mendeley for $100 million dollars.
Mendeley is a free, multiplatform social bibliography tool that allows users to manage collections, find links (citations, authors, ideas) among papers and setup networks of researchers
It offers features to help with automatic metadata extraction using a powerful "metadata scanner"
PDF scanner automatically pulls key information from articles such as author, title and journal name; PDFs can be annotated and highlighted; iPhone/iPad app integration
Compatible with Microsoft Word, but requires a plug-in
Interdisciplinary and works for physics to humanities; academic librarians who promote and provide technical support for citation management programs should be aware of the strengths and potential problems that users will face in using Mendeley
~100 million documents and a million members according to counter on main page
crowdsourced research database with a unique layer of social information for users
leverage information generated such as trends in research so users can discover where fields are heading, and how individual interests are changing over time
as users share papers or load their bibliographies, Mendeley will show papers they may have missed
Mendeley continues to innovate; tags allow users to find related material faster
In 2007, 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. The information can be synchronized with an account on Mendeley Web, allowing access to your library from anywhere. Similar to other bibliographic software tools, Mendeley eliminates data input and enables researchers to manage, tag, search full-text, annotate, cite and share papers with other Mendeley users. In addition, it provides social features not found in other tools such as word clouds, trending topics in papers and most-cited authors, and embeddable document collections. Mendeley Research Library displays authors, journals and tags and includes quality rating metrics and recommendation mechanisms.
programmatic access to research trend data is available via API
News
In 2012, Mendeley announced that it would partner with Swets to create an Mendeley Institutional Edition (MIE) with all kinds of interesting article tracking metrics and trends features. Several US universities have also licensed Mendeley for campus-wide use. On releasing the new MIE dashboard, Mendeley said "....[this new tool] brings research impact measurement to real-time speed, while also providing more granular and social metrics of how academic research is consumed, discussed, and annotated. It allows research institutions to see detailed analytics of the journals their academics are reading, the journals they are publishing in, and how many readers those publications have. This data is built on Mendeley’s global research community of more than 1.8 million academics who are using the startup’s tools for document management, discovery, and collaboration." For more information, see the white paper "Where is the library in the Digital workflow of research?".
Mendeley grabs citation information from pdfs via Desktop client and citation information from webpages via browser bookmarklet, whereas Zotero grabs citation information from webpages and, where possible, XMP-based metadata from PDFs
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 contains some proprietary code
Mendeley is still in beta so developers are constantly improving it
In Mendeley, create collections and even a second level of collection (sub collection) on the desktop, but see disadvantages
Store collections and their citations in a web/cloud so you can access them wherever you are on earth (but remember the last and first thing you do when opening up Mendeley is to synchronize with the web)
Share with other people even those not registered (though once invited they have to join to see citations)
Importing happens on the spot (without tedious procedure of saving into text files and using filters the way EndNote requires) and individual citations are placed in a collection (for serial importing, there are some disadvantages)
Occasionally (don't ask for percentage) if PDF is available (ex: Pubmedcentral) it will be picked up by importing
Citations can be exported to EndNote and Zotero (though a bit more difficult because RIS format does not match Zotero "stencil")
Synchronizing Mendeley (web /desktop) synchronizes citations and collections
Downloading Mendeley does not require administrative rights; cite while you write (requires word plugin)
Some disadvantages include: impossible to create your own bibliographic style
Plugins for Word and web importer are not easy to install and can evaporate easily
Check imported citations as mistakes happen even when importing from PubMed
Not compatible with Ovid and Cinahl; citations are tagged generically so some information is missing and citations can't be filed in particular collections
Not possible to create second level of collection (or sub-collection) on Mendeley web
When importing several citations, individually select citation for authorization
You need both Mendeley web and Mendeley desktop to be able to cite while you write
Storage 1GB of free online storage, not limitless; seems to be plenty of space
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