A revolutionary optimist and expert procrastinator, Minka Stoyanova subscribes to Wheaton’s Law, believes that brie and red wine will solve most of life’s problems and likes to pretend she is working towards a PhD at City University of Hong Kong’s School of Creative Media.

WHAT IS MENDELEY?

                                                                                                           [Mendeley is all of the things, Mendeley is my brain]

Mendeley is a research management/digital library software package. Although the library can manage a variety of media types, Mendeley’s strengths lie in its text-based-content manipulation. The software package includes a reference manager (a la refworks, or Word’s embedded citation manager), a digital library interface (like Calibre), an e-reading application (similar to Kindle Reader, Adobe Reader, Preview, Google Books etc), and a collaboration tool which allows researchers to share documents and view each other’s notes. It also includes web-based social functions such as the creation of profiles, much like Academia.edu.

Documents imported into the Mendeley library are also backed up to cloud servers along with any notes, highlights and annotations. These documents are synced to the cloud and available across computers/devices.

Mendeley is not necessarily the superior option for any one of these functions, but its ability to integrate all of these functions into one software experience makes it a flexible and streamlined option, wherein researchers are able to pick and choose the functions that best suit their research styles, creating an ideal research management tool.

I don’t use all of Mendeley’s features. For instance, I have never used Mendeley’s social or collaboration tools, though I can see why they would be useful for group-work situations. I also rarely use Mendeley as a reference/citation manager as I do most of my writing in Google Docs. Google Docs does not (directly) support Mendeley citations and while there are workarounds available to use Mendeley’s citation engine in non-supported word processors, I am lazy and create my citations in the old-fashioned way.

In the few cases where I have used Mendeley as a citation manager, I have found it intuitive and powerful. It creates citations and bibliographies in an impressive number of journal-specific/general styles with tight integration for Word, LibreOffice, and BibTex.

For me, Mendeley’s most powerful functionality is in the integration of a solid library interface and a solid e-reading application as this combination solves the two greatest challenges facing academic researchers:

1.  Going Digital: Freeing oneself from the paper prison…

2.  Actually Knowing Things

In the next two posts, I will review Mendeley’s functionality as a Library Interface and as an E-Reader.  Finally, I will review discuss some of the cons of a move to Mendeley and suggestions to get around them.