Mendeley Manage Share and Discover Research Papers.
Mendeley is free social software for managing and sharing research papers. It is a Web 2.0 site for discovering research trends and connecting to like-minded academics. The former chairman of Last.fm is working with Mendeley.
You have to download some small program to upload your articles (pdf’s) to your library on Mendeley. There is a windows, mac and even linux version of the program. After download you can choose to have the program find the title and authors as well as journal for you. On your desktop you can change or add metadata, filter by author, make document groups and see all the references of the article imported. Will take some time to upload it, didn’t try mass upload yet, not aware if this is possible. In your desktop app you can sync with the website of Mendeley.
After login the fun starts. Besides your library with all your pdf’s you can see the most read articles in your field.You can make a profile with photo and resume. In the statistics part (statistics are fun) you can see the number of users by academic discipline, most read authors and most read authors in your field, most frequently used tags etc. This is were las.fm came in.
You can aslo search members per academic field and collect contacts. There is even a map with all members on the map, only found 3 other Dutch scientists. It’s difficult to choose between Mendeley and Labmeeting. Can someone help, what do you think? I have a perfect solution for my computer: Sente, but I haven’t decided yet on my online library. Maybe the first one to make a sync tool with Sente will become my favorite online library.
January 30, 2009 @ 10:50 am
If I use mass uploading (> 3000 references) it seems to stall. I am not convinced what online ref-tool I should use.
January 30, 2009 @ 10:51 am
If I use mass uploading (> 3000 references) it seems to stall. I am not yet convinced what online ref-tool I should use.
January 30, 2009 @ 11:39 am
@ Jan me to, but do we really need one. For me it would be very handy to be able to have the articles online so that I can find them when needed and not behind the most used computer.
Regards Dr Shock
P.S will keep searching
January 30, 2009 @ 3:45 pm
Hi Dr Shock,
thanks for the post! With regards to your online library – yes, you can upload all your papers to your Mendeley online library and you can access them there as well. However, if you upload 100 PDF’s with 1 MB each, it will take a while. But we are currently working on (a) improving the online library, so that you can manage, share, and view all your research papers in the same way as you can in Mendeley Desktop and (b) on a bookmarklet which lets you copy reference information directly from websites.
Jan, with regards to >3000 references – we are trying hard on improving the speed of uploading large sets of references and the next release will again be fast than the current one, but if you encounter a specific problem, please get in touch with me with a description of the bug and I’ll make sure someone from the tech team will have a look at it.
Other comments and feedback are more than welcome here: http://feedback.mendeley.com
Thanks again
Jan (jan.reichelt@mendeley.com)
January 30, 2009 @ 9:49 pm
@jan and jan Uploading such a large amount of articles is mostly a one time job. Isn’t it an idea to give new subscribers a slot on bandwith of server space to load up their backlock. Don’t know the technical words for it but just a time slot of 1-2 hours with the opportunity to upload their articles?
kind regards Dr shock
February 1, 2009 @ 12:47 am
Dr Shock,
Mendeley is not restricting bandwith, but upload speeds from broadband providers are usually slower than download speeds, that’s why it takes more time – but it’s true that it’s mostly a one time job, but the benefit of having your whole library online in Mendeley and accessible from everywhere is hopefully worth the effort.
Regards
Jan
February 3, 2009 @ 3:47 pm
I annotate my pdf with adobe pro so I am able to write and underline in the pdf itself. It would be nice to be able to do that online as well.
I did not yet try to upload the annotated pdf to see what happens.
It would be nice if an online tool would be able to
1) show me what is the last time I viewed a particular pdf
2) show me which pdf have I annotated
3) be able extract all the selected text in a pdf and display it on a page with references
The search goes on.
February 3, 2009 @ 5:22 pm
Hi Jan, in Mendeley’s next release you can add notes and tags in your online library as well (however not yet directly into the PDF). We are also in the process of integrating a PDF viewer in Mendeley Desktop and Mendeley Web, but I’m not sure about the annotating capabilities of any online PDF viewers.
With regards to your other points:
1) Good suggestion – I added this to our feedback system.
2) This is shown both in Mendeley Desktop (already) and Mendeley Web (next release) with a small icon next to the entry.
3) This is the most tricky part and quite difficult – we are doing this in the background already to make your PDF’s full-text searchable, but in order to display it correctly we need to take into account copyright laws and we need to do some clean-up of the data first.
February 3, 2009 @ 6:15 pm
Thanks for the quick response.
I indeed did not yet come across an online viewer with inline pdf annotating capabilities. But since adobe pro is able to do it must be possible.
February 4, 2009 @ 1:18 pm
I guess Mendeley is fantastic, Sente and other iTune based applications share same problem-they are not portable to windows and linux,
How to Defrost the Digital Library | Dr Shock MD PhD
February 9, 2009 @ 6:22 am
[…] using URIs, so it is not possible to link in from external sources to these personal collections. Mendeley is a similar application that helps to manage and share research papers. It has a Web-based browser […]
MedLib’s Round, First Edition « Laika’s MedLibLog
February 13, 2009 @ 3:02 am
[…] and a Web 2.0 site for discovering research trends and connecting to like-minded academics (see Mendeley Manage Share and Discover Research Papers). Dr. Shock didn’t make up his mind yet whether he prefers Mendeley or Labmeeting (described […]
March 18, 2010 @ 4:31 am
This site lets you upload as much as you want free. I’ve ever saw anythign like it.