Mendeley: Research Library and Social Network All in One

Review by Wren Elhai

Mendeley wants to do it all—it organizes your electronic articles and citations, makes writing a works cited or a list of references a snap, and lets you easily share your work with colleagues across the hall or around the world. It elegantly integrates a desktop program, browser and word processor plugins, and an online networking site.

Why is Mendeley useful? You probably have a folder full of PDFs you’ve collected from various online sites, planning to read and use at some point in the future. However, it’s often hard to find the one article you need in the clutter of your computer’s hard drive. Mendeley solves this problem with its stand-alone program, Mendeley Desktop. Just add all your PDF files to your library and Mendeley will extract (with pretty good success rates) the author, title, journal, and year of publication for each one. You can then use the program as a sort of iTunes for your documents.

Instantly search the full text of your library for a word, author, or journal. Make collections to group articles that deal with the same subject, including citations or abstracts for articles you don’t have electronic versions of. When you find what you’re looking for, you can read and annotate PDFs right in the Mendeley window.

Mendeley recognizes data from a wide variety of online article databases (including PubMed, ScienceDirect, and JSTOR). Once you’ve set up the Mendeley browser plugin (aka the Mendeley ‘bookmarklet’), you can just click a button in your browser to capture a citation and abstract for the article you’re viewing on your screen. In many cases, you’ll even be able to download a full text PDF, right from your Mendeley window. Or, tell Mendeley to watch a certain folder, and it will automatically add PDFs you download and even refile them by author or journal. If you keep your articles organized in Mendeley as you read them, exporting a properly formatted list of references to Word becomes an easy, two-step process.

You could just use the article organizing capabilities of Mendeley without ever touching the social media features. However, they’re actually worth using, and are intelligently designed to promote easy collaboration and broader dissemination of new research. On the Mendeley webpage, you can create a profile, share your biographical information, and load all of your published articles and book chapters as publically accessible PDFs. The search function makes it easy to find others who are working on similar topics and download their work, direct from the source.

Once you have a group of colleagues who all use Mendeley, you can share a collection of articles, allowing up to 10 people to access your full-text PDFs. At the very least, this allows you to quickly access articles you read frequently, even if you’re not at your work computer. Just load them into your account, and you can download them just by logging into your Mendeley account online.

Mendeley is still in Beta testing, which means it is sometimes a bit cranky and can crash unexpectedly. However, as the bugs are ironed out, it promises to be a very useful piece of software.

For more useful tips on the social media tools that will make your professional life easier, check out our Social Media Resource Center.