Mendeley - an academic reference manager

After using Papers on Mac and being disappointed by the lack of updates and platform flexibility, I found Mendeley. This has to be the best free program that a university science student can have in order to organize, label, and cite academic journal articles. I'm so excited about it that my palms are sweaty (which means that I should probably calm down).

Links:

Mendeley - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Academic reference management software for researchers | Mendeley

 

Nice, it looks really cool! I'll give it a try.

 

Great stuff, good find. Thanks a lot

 

It's going to take a lot to drag me away from Zotero but this looks interesting. Thanks!

 

Alternatively write anything in TeX/LaTeX and your issue is solved too And you get nice formulae

I'm writing my final year project in that.

 

Maybe my title was somewhat unclear, but Mendeley can be more accurately described as an iTunes for academic journals in PDF format. Once your PDFs are in Mendeley, it'll search a number of databases and match metadata to your PDF, enabling YOU to search and root through your papers as much as you wish. Mendeley will also create citations for you, though that isn't its primary function. Take a look!

 

Well, Papers generally have a header with all the information on it.

And considering that I'll have stuff strewn across several folders...
I can have a look - although I'm not sure why you'd need a programme to manage references...

(On that note though - my final year project won't need a lot of referencing - it'll need quite some software writing though...)

 

Papers can fetch metadata, but it doesn't do it automatically. You have to search yourself, while Mendeley will very accurately do it for you. It is also updated frequently with improvements.

Plus, Mendeley is multi-platform and FREE!!!

 

I meant the nice little heading - that's not really metadata - who has written it etc. - that's on every paper.

I've signed up for it... and dowloaded it... to be honest I'm not impressed, heck, it doesn't even find all!!!

Maybe I'll get to appreciate it overall... I don't know yet - but right now I don't.

 

Its essential to use a program to manage references in written documents. You don't have to worry about formatting each one, you just apply general changes. Also, no need to check if all cited references are included in the reference list (at the end), and viceversa.

I've been using Reference Manager for a long time now...

 

Use TeX/LaTeX and just put them at the bottom and include a "cite" comment - as long as you update the list as you use them there is now worry there, and no worry about formatting either.
And yes, that does result in the plain old numbers references - but why use something fancy? (which TeX can apparently support too, but numbered ones are fine too in my case)

On another note - as I mentioned earlier - my final year project will require very few references in the end. - It's just the nature of the project.

To be honest I couldn't see why such a manager would be useful - I do my reading on an ereader now (where the pdf isn't messed up) and create my notes on paper...

 

Mendeley does not conflic tin any way with Calibre does it? Does it complement Calibre in any obvious way?

Thanks.

 

I don't know if it complements Calibre as they have different purposes entirely, but I do know that Mendeley can be set to copy PDFs to a library, leaving the originals untouched. It can also watch folders.

 

In my case its not abour getting fancy, but I have to write papers and the citation/bibliography format has to match the journal requirements exactly, and then is wher the RefMan "output style editor" comes in very handy...

but actually, its more like "I got used to this and I'm too lazy to learn something new"

 

I suppose you have a point there.

If you are bound to a citation style that does make life easier.
TeX can actually display a lot of styles - but I find the instructions on how to use them - ehm - "unclear" (useless) - OK, I don't know TeX or LaTeX well - but they were unintelligible to me - I'm sure a TeX expert would just take 10s to get the result I wanted.
But I pretty much emailed my Final Year Project (Bachelor) supervisor and he said numbers are fine, so numbers it is