As an experimental biochemist embedded in a largely computational research group I was lucky enough to be exposed to some clever software tools that simplify everyday tasks such as primer design, DNA sequencing, homology modelling, and viewing protein structures. However I noticed my peers were still performing many tedious tasks by hand, or using some really terrible software. The best example of this was reference management, where Endnote was essentially ubiquitous, but everyone had problems with it. However, there is a better way. Mendeley is a free reference management tool that integrates seamlessly with MS Word, and Open Office. The developers of Mendeley have an excellent website with easy to follow tutorials on the main features, see here, but nothing beats the experiences of someone who uses it on a daily basis.
WHAT IS MENDELEY?
Essentially, Mendeley is iTunes for your research papers. Its allows for easy uploading, storage, and retrieval of your papers from multiple computers, in multiple formats. In addition, it automatically generates a copy of all your documents on the cloud, thanks to the free 500Mb of storage space they provide for every user. Here is what it looks like when you have built your library.
You can see it's very well laid out. The main screen is your selection of research papers, with all the useful details listed such as title, authors, year of publication, and journal. Just having all your research papers like this makes a huge difference to how you find and use them. Mendeley is packed full of useful features, but after using this software for over two years the main features I think people will be interested in are as follows,
- cataloguing of all of your research papers visible through one portal
- super-fast library searching
- sending and receiving documents to/from other Mendeley users
- access the original website from which the article was downloaded
- digital annotation and highlighting of articles/sections of articles
- the ability to access your library from any online computer
Creating your library is straightforward. I found the best way was to simply select the “Watch Folder” option from the add files menu in the main toolbar, and browse to the folder which contains your documents of interest. They can be pdf or word documents. Mendeley will now proceed to add each document to the library, scanning each for useful details such the title, the authors, the journal it was published in. In addition, any documents subsequently added to the folder will now automatically be visible in Mendeley. The documents do not need to be labelled logically for Mendeley to populate the metadata for each article. This is akin to letting iTunes fetch the details of a particular track for you, so that you have the correct album art, singer, album name etc. However, Mendeley does not always get this right, so some manual manipulation may be required to clean up the data. I consider this a small price to pay considering the benefits granted by the rest of the functions. Once you have your documents imported I recommend using the synchronisation functionality, this uploads everything to the cloud storage they provide, allowing you to access it from any computer with an internet connection.
SEARCHING YOUR LIBRARY
Once you have imported your documents the first thing you’ll notice is that double clicking on any one of the articles beings you to a full version of the document. This is fully searchable via the toolbar on the top right. It might not seem like a major feature, but when you’re trying to remember where you came across the evidence for that statement in your thesis it’s an extremely valuable and saving feature. In addition, your whole library is searchable, so you can search for authors names, or journal name, or just individual terms you are interested in. It’s happened to me before that I couldn’t remember the author, but I could remember a particular term used with the article, a few keystrokes quickly narrows down the list of possible suspects. It’s worth noting, the more effort you put into having the correct details for each article the better the results of any search will be. If you’re slightly OCD like me you’ll actually get enjoyment out of making sure everything is correct, and welcome the distraction from writing your thesis.
SENDING/RECEIVING ARTICLES
How much you use this feature depends on how collaborative your research group is, and how many other people you can convince to use Mendeley. Essentially it allows you to select any of journal articles from your library and send them to any other Mendeley user that you have invited to join Mendeley. It’s actually much quicker than email, and the document is automatically integrated to your existing library, including any notes, and annotation made by the previous “owner”. The recipient does not have to have a subscription to the online publisher of that article, so it’s an excellent way to share papers among less privileged colleagues.
ACCESS TO ORIGINAL URL
This is perhaps one of my favourite features in Mendely. It very common for the research paper you are reading to cite other articles of interest. Tracking down references can be extremely time- consuming (read pain in the ass!) depending on how the original paper referenced them. The easiest way by far is to go to the URL of the original paper, and hope that they have supplied there list of references as hyperlinks. This would allow you to get all their references relatively quickly. However, even this means you still have search for the original paper in Google Scholar, or PubMed, Mendeley can by-pass all of that time consuming nonsense by providing the URL of the source article you are reading in the right-hand toolbar. Think about what this means now. With the URL provided to you all you have to do is click on the link and you are on the correct webpage for that article! From here you can go straight to the reference section of the look for hyperlinks. It’s an extremely fast and very effective way to navigate from source to source with no typing involved.
DIGITAL ANNOTATION AND HIGHLIGHTING
A relatively minor, but useful feature of Mendeley is that individual documents can be have “sticky notes” attached to them, essentially a collapsible text box which you can place anywhere. Generally useful for making quick notes of questions, or thoughts as you read the paper. It’s also possible to make more detailed notes in the toolbar on the right hand side, this is a better option in my opinion, since these notes are searchable, so you can actually pick out a paper based on the contents of the notes you made as you were reading it.
ACCESS, ANYTIME, ANYWHERE
Provided you have synchronised your library and you have downloaded Mendeley you will have access to your library from any computer with an internet connection. So, for example, I used to do the majority of my thesis writing in my University. But occasionally I would work from home. For me this meant I lost my access rights to the journals that supplied all those nice papers I needed. So. on these occasions I would make sure to dump any relevant research paper I could into Mendeley nd syncronise it before leaving for home. Once home, Mendeley allowed me to continue reading and inserting citations to my thesis as if I had university access. But if I ever needed something I could always get it send to me from someone who also had that document in their library. This allowed for seamless integration between multiple computers. In fact during the writing on my thesis I went through three laptops and two desktops, but it was never a problem, my library was always on the cloud, and between Dropbox and Mendeley I was back writing from where I left off within 20mins of switching to an entirely new computer I had never used before. Think about that for a moment, normally a computer failing is a massive problem mid-thesis write up. But Mendeley and Dropbox together meant I never had a single problem I could not recover from quickly.
THE CONCLUSION
In short, I can’t recommend this software highly enough. It's fantastic. It’s intuitive, and actually fun to use. On the one occasion I had a technical issue it was resolved within 24 hours, with follow up from the support team to make sure I had what I needed. Bear in mind, this is free software, and the support they offer is far superior than anything I’ve experienced with Dell, or Microsoft. Download it, play with it, and enjoy stress free referencing! Do it now! :)
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