Organise your digital research library using Mendeley (and never worry about references again…!)

 

Where do you store all your research material, be it academic papers, your own research output, papers published in the press and practitioner journals? How do you organise all these resources? If, like me, you have all these electronic papers spread all over your hard drive in unstructured folders (and most likely, multiple copies of these on several computers) you will have asked yourself whether there is a way to get better organised. The problem is made worse when you have reached the stage when you need to populate the references section of your own papers – with resources all over the place, it can be tricky to cross reference everything.

A number of solutions have been around for some time, for example Endnote and more recently Zotero. I never got to understand how the former worked. As for the latter, it started as a Firefox extension so one had to use the Firefox browser in order to reap the rewards of the software. But then came Chrome and I never looked back. The new kid on the block is Mendeley, a free iPad app that organises your library, stores and syncs your PDF papers with their servers and makes them available on any computer through their website, and on the iPad through their iPad app. That’s not all. Mendeley suggests other research papers based on the papers you read, and works very well with research repository services such as Science Direct where it automatically extracts the reference of the paper you access on the service.

As a reference manager, Mendeley automatically generates citations and bibliographies in Microsoft Word and Open Office. As a PDF manager, Mendeley allows you to annotate your research articles on your iPad, capture your notes and highlight text. If you collaborate with others on an assignment or research paper, Mendeley helps you share your library (and your annotations) with co-workers.

Setting it up
Setting up is a three-step process. First, create a free account and download Mendeley for free on your Windows or Mac pc where your papers are located.
Second, drag and drop all your research papers in a PDF format onto the Mendeley app on your desktop. The software automatically extracts various fields, such as author names, title, publication etc and builds a library. You can ask Mendeley to monitor specific folders or sub-folders on your pc, and each time you save a new PDF document in that fold it will be added to your Mendeley library.
Third, check all fields are correct, organise and tag individual articles for easy retrieval, for example using keywords. You can also organise your library using folders and sub-folders in Mendeley – useful to distinguish resources useful for your teaching vs. the research projects you might be working on. Finally, all you need to do is sync the library with their servers by clicking the Sync button in Mendeley, and a copy of your all your resources is then stored on their servers. Each individual is granted 1GB storage space for free.

Your library on your iPad for access anytime, anywhere
On your iPad, download the free app, login using the same credentials as the ones you used to sign up for Mendeley on the pc, then sync the library – Mendeley automatically updates your library on your iPad and give you links to all your articles in your library. In terms of storage, Mendeley does not transfer each paper onto your iPad, but creates a shortcut. You can then download the paper you want directly on the device. This way, your library does not waste any of the limited storage capacity of your iPad.

The video on their web page provides a good overview of the many functionalities the software offer, and further short video tutorials are available on their website.

I will update this post with screenshots when I get a chance.