Occasionally on Cultural Bytes I will review tools that help my ethnographer-self stay sane, organized and useful to society. I am confident to say that every researcher I know IS CURRENTLY dealing with what I am addressing below - citation and PDF nightmares. Today is the first day you can take a step towards freedom, organization, and access.
In Russian, Mendeley means comforter of the mind. What better name for a product that is a comforter for researchers! (here’s the founders’ explanation for the name, which I found out has nothing to do with the Russian meaning)
This software will change your researching-intellectual, academiky life forever! Sick of dealing with all those pdf’s on your computer, entering in citations by hand, looking for citations in your old documents, dealing with endnotes, and not being able to access your citations remotely? Most of us are dealing with this issue. Olivia Judson recently wrote about her academic organizing woes with managing PDF’s in NY Times,
“…it became easier to re-research a subject each time I wanted to think about it, and to download the papers again. My hard drive has filled up with duplicates; my office, with stalagmites of paper…In short, access to information is easier and faster than ever before but there’s been no obvious way to manage it once you’ve got it.”
Well Julia there’s a solution, MENDELEY SOLVES ALL THESE PROBLEMS! We all share similar citation nightmares! It’s time to get ride of endnotes, refworks, zotero and whatever other wannabe hawt citation software manager you use - and get yourself Mendeley! And they don’t discriminate - they love MAC and PC users!
This is cloud computing for researchers. How would you feel if you could access your PDF’s and citations anywhere in the world? if you could share citation lists with colleagues in just one click? If you never had to re-download your PDF’s again? If you could search for books on Amazon.com and click one button to cite the book you are buying? If you could just drop citations into Word or whatever document without having to shell out a couple hundred of dollars for Endnotes? If you could network with other researchers and see their citation lists? If you could just add whatever books you see in Google Book search to your citation list with one click?
Imaginations for researchers come true also - with Mendeley you have can have all these desires fulfilled!
Think of this as an itunes for your pdf’s + Linkedin + facebook + doppler + updated CV + Papers (for macs)+ all the features of every single citation manager out there + love + intellect + seamlessness. Welcome to the world of Mendeley - Loveeee!
If you’re like me - traveling in different cities every week and working between 3 different computers (MACs and PCs) - then this is truly your dream come true. Or if you just work between your office and home computer this is a dream! And even if you are just on 1 computer - this could just be as good as the invention of rss!
I suggest you take out a few hours to play with it and then set aside a week to import all your citations and get your academik life together! It’s worth it! They are still in beta, so there are little quirks here and there - but the Mendeley team is REALLY awesome and you can just write to them about your issues or post it online and they actually respond!
Below, I list my favorite features of Mendeley and some recommendations for how to use Mendeley.
1.) Mendeley works. It really works!!! that is a good enough reason to try it ou. In this picture of my Mendeley Desktop, I walk you through how to start it out! STEP 1.) create a group - you don’t have to do this but I like to organize my citations by topics, 2.) add a document - you can drag a PDF or do it this way below by clicking on the “add document” icon on top. STEP 3.) admire your pretty citations! update the info, make sure it’s correct, STEP 4.) check out their great search features!
2.) use it with dropbox if you switch between several computers- keep your PDF’s in your dropbox, and rename the file with the author’s last name and year. Dropbox is a virtual file folder that physically sits on each of your computers. It’s magic - you just have to install it and start moving your files there. You can access them online anytime!
store all your PDF’s in one folder - and never look at them again. Just like how you drop music in your itunes app without having to interact with the actual file itself, same thing here (this only works for people who are on 1 computer)! In this picture below you can see how my dropbox is on the far left, then I look for Victor Gonzalez’s work in my dropbox by his last name and just in case if I have to manually pull the file, (which I have to because I have I use dropbox on 3 different computers so once you switch it loses the directory path), you can then find it very easily in your folder. When I type in Gonzalez’s name in Mendeley, all his citations show up as linked to the files!
3.) Automatic recognition of a PDF’s meta-data when you drag and drop it into Mendeley. In the picture below, I show you how to just drag a PDF into Mendeley and it automatically recognizes the author, journal, pub date and etc. Think of this like itunes- when you drag a song over it copies a verion over to it’s own itunes folder.To activate this, you have to turn on File Organizer (they spell it “organiser” cuz they’re all british about it). The Mendeley Muz man says that “if you enable the File Organiser, this will make Mendeley create a copy of these files in their own folder, which it then links against. This means you’re then free to edit the original file names, or to move them about as need be without breaking the file links. To do this, open up Mendeley Desktop, go to the Preferences panel and select the “File Organiser” tab. From here, you can enable the file organiser, and also choose how it should store the files in this folder by enabling the rename or sorting into subfolders as you see fit.
Then I like to go to the tag-notes tab in Mendeley desktop and paste in the abstract and type in some tags. Make sure to SAVE it because pressing save in the meta-data tabs it doesn’t save the information for the entire file - you have to save in each tab. I hope they fix it next time update (update - they have said that this is fixed in the newest version).
4.) Access your PDF’s online anywhere! After you have dragged in a PDF sync your library and watch everything duplicate itself to your online library. THIS IS BIGG! That means just as long as Mendeley is not blocked where you are trying to access it, then you won’t ever have problems getting to the physical PDF online! And it’s not blocked in China so I am so confident about getting to all my files at any internet cafe!
5.) Seamless Syncing with your Mendeley Desktop and your online library! In this picture below I have side by side my desktop and my online Mendeley Library - you can see here that the citations match, and so do the grouping. completely identical! that means you could leave the country and then use a computer at an internet cafe or at a friend’s house and have access to all your citations and any synced pdf’s. And Last time I checked, Mendeley is NOT blocked in China!! (Drop box is blocked though which really sucks)
6.) import books from Amazon or Google Books! In this picture, I am looking at Go Away Dog in Google books - this is a very important book for academic researchers. with one click this book shows up in your Mendeley reference list. STEP 1.) read about the functions here, STEP 2.) install the bookmarklet by dragging it to your toolbar in firefox STEP 3.) start looking for books in AMazon or Google books! you can import multiple books at one time or just a single book like in the picture below.
7.) Produces beautiful ways of visualizing information. I love that Mendeley shows you stats about the most cited authors and the research fields that have the most Mendeley users.
I liked that in the Social Sciences tag cloud, technology and nude, were next to each other - kinda much us look like an exciting field huh?
Below you can see that bourdieu is the most cited, with Bruno Latour coming in second, then Manuel Castells, then Michele badass Foucault, and lastly WTF SAMUEL annOYING Huffington who wrote the Clash of Civilizations. We have to get Samuel off the top 5 and put someone - anyone - up there!
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HOW IT COMPARES TO ZOTERO -ok so now that I’ve raved about Mendeley - I feel that I need to explain why I prefer Mendeley over Zotero since I wrote about how much I loved Zotero a few months ago on my old blog (I switched to tumblr for my personal blog!)
- Mendeley support team is wayy better than zotero. - For Mendeley, within 24 hours a staff (the co-founder!) responded to my questions. I have yet to hear back from Zotero staff about any of my problems that I posted in their help forum. I think that after I complained to some people who know some people at Zotero, eventually, one of the Zotero creators was sweet enough to write a personal email to me about my original zotero love post on my personal blog- he even offered to send me a t-shirt! So that was really nice of them, but I’m sorry Zotero staff - me firefox quits on me every time on zotero and i zpent a whole day trouble-shooting with no succezz!
- Mendeley staff actually write back to you! now I know that programmers, developers, and founders are busy and that they can’t write back to everyone - but after posting two problems on zotero i didn’t get any responses - still haven’t yet. In Mendeley land - I heard something back from the programmers within 8 hours!
- Mendeley’s help forums are better. l had to search through lots of support forums on Zotero to find out if others had similar problems in firefox as I did - and it wasn’t always clear if Zotero staff were aware of these problems. There was no clear mechanism for processing user-identified problems. In Mendeley, it’s clear that their staff are on top of the forum convos. It’s easier to navigate and they have a clear rating system that let’s you see how other users have prioritized proposed features or fixes to Mendeley staff.
- not firefox dependent. - THIS IS BIGGGGGG - You’re not dependent on firefox with mendeley. I love firefox - but my firefox started freaking out after a few hours of Zotero courtship. Out of desparation to make Zotero work (because I thought it was the best thing out there at the time), I actually spent 4 hours troubleshooting my firefox after I installed zotero - it messed with my extensions and eventually I had to perform a clean reinstall. Encountering the firefox crash again, I tested out zotero in flock but flock 2.0 is still wayyyy tooo slow and there was no way that I was even going near netscape - that’s when I resorted to the clean reinstall of firefox. But still Zotero was buggy. so the problem with having a browser dependent citation manager is that you’re dependent on that browser - and on that computer’s browsers.
- Mendeley has $$ - they just recieved $2million in VC money. Zotero is a non-profit model. While I work for non-profits and do see them as useful at times, I believe in the scalability of Mendeley more than Zotero. Now I am curious to find out Mendeley’s business model. right now I can upload ALL my PDf’s to Mendeley But good services are worth it when the rates are reasonable and your entire life depends on it. Maybe they will start charging all of us once we all fall in love with Mendeley - or offer some kind of tiered service. *but please don’t start charging me in the future since I am one of your beta fans!
- Mendeley has $$ from realllly smart people - did I mention the investors behind the $2million are founders of last.fm and skype? that’s all that needs to be said.
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If you will notice that in my comments, the human side of the service is just as important as the software application itself. Especially when a program is in beta, you have to be super keen to talking to your users. I always think that companies have a lot more at stake when they are starting out and the period after they’ve hit critical mass. Becasse when you’re popular - everyone want to use you and they will be forgiving about mishaps, slow-downs and etc. But once you have your customers and you become lazy in your product/service, eventually something better will replace you. Mendeley and Jan Reichelt, you have been wonderful during this courtship. So far your actions tell me that we will have a great relationship…so don’t mess it up.
For now, I will take on the responsibility of evangelizing Mendely around the world. Last time I checked on Mendeley user map, there were 3 users in San Diego, 1 in Mexico City and 1 in China. I think I can help increase those numbers. Just watch them go up! And right now there are only 280 Social Science users - we need to change that also!
I love being a beta-user and I love getting excited about great products like Mendelye! The last time I was this excited is when I discovered rss, flickr, gmail, movable type, Jetblue, crack (just checkin!), Dunkin Donuts, Shakor’s, and Obama. So get yourself on it!
UPDATE - May 30, 2010:
I’m still using Mendeley and loving it! which each new release they are improving their product. There are still a few bugs that are really annoying and a few features that have yet to be introduced (like checking for double citations or customizable citations boxes), but hey there is nothing else like this!.
I want to share some tips after a year of using it.
Make sure that you back-up your files A LOT! I backup everytime I add tons of citations. Just go to to HELP-> Backup. I backup to a folder on my Dropbox labeled Mendeley backups that way if your computer ever crashes or is stolen, you will always have an online backup! It takes no more than 30 seconds. I urge you to be fanatical about backing up because you don’t want to end up like me where one day my Mendeley panicked and shut down. I had just finished 2 days of intensive Mendeley citation work - so I lost about a few hundred citations and had to go back and re-add each one. Sadness.
2.) I prefer to import books using the Mendeley bookmarklet from Google books than Amazon books. Citations from Google will have the summary/abstract imported in with the meta-data. This makes book searching a lot easier!
3.) fyi - Mendeley still classifies most pdf’s as journal submissions. This is flustering for me because I download a lot of stuff from CHI and more techy journals where the presentation and publication format is a conference proceeding.
4.) I use the notes section as a way to annotate my citings.
5.) I love Mendeley’s customer support! Jan and Mustaquli you guys rock!
UPDATE - JUNE 2, 2010:
Someone asked me to clarify what I meant my setting up a folder just for PDFs on my dropbox. So let me explain how I do this. I pay $99 a year for 50 gigs of Dropbox storage space. If you just want to use it for free, you get 5 gigs free! and if you refer people you can get up to 5 more gigs! That’s a lot of space for free. I use Dropbox because I live in the moment of crashing and file loss. Dropbox is an online cloud computing file storage system - so that means where ever I go, my files are always accessible online. You install Dropbox as a folder on your computer. You can put the folder anywhere and on the surface it functions just like any other folder on your computer. The most important part is that is done real-time syncing. So the nano-second I drop a file into my dropbox or even make a change, that change is updated to the my online dropbox
So by storing all my PDF’s in my Dropbox, that means I always have a backup online of all my PDFs. This is awesome. So in my computer crashes or is stolen, I don’t risk losing any of my PDFs or any of the material that I have in my Dropbox. I also do a third back-up on my mobile tiny 500gig Lacie drive and I do 4th backup on my stationary back-up located in a remote place that has the least chances of getting stolen.
So here’s a screenshot of how you set it up to backup to a self-designated folder on Dropbox.
1.) install Dropbox.
2.) create a folder for all your PDFs and name it. I’ved named mine ALL PDFs. From now on this will be the folder where all your PDFs will be stored. However, you will NEVER have to change any of the files names in this folder. Mendeley will automatically do this for you.
3.) go to your Mendeley Desktop, click on the top left MENDELEY DESKTOP —> PREFERENCES —> FILE ORGANIZER (3rd tab).
4.) check the box ORGANIZE MY FILES
5.) click on browse and chose your PDF folder. So notice that the directory will show that this ALL PDF folder sits within your Dropbox.
6.) check the box RENAME DOCUMENT FILES.
7.) chose how you want your files to be named. I chose the order, AUTHOR-YEAR - TITLE. I prefer author first because this is the easiest way for me to find the file by name in my folder if you were to click on it and look for it. For now I have it on Hypon-separate, but I should’ve chosen underscore.
8.) download a journal article or use an existing journal article. Physically DRAG the file over with your mouse into your mendeley. Mendeley will automatically download the meta-data AND it will be create a copy in your ALL PDF folder AND it will rename the file according to your instructions.
9.) you can double check for yourself - go look in your ALL PDFs and you will see your file there renamed!
10.) delete your downloaded file or wherever the file was located. Now all your PDFs will sit in your ALL PDF folder, Mendeley will handle everything!
11.) here is something important to know - Mendeley automatically REANMES all pdfs! so if you make a change to the author or title of a document in Mendeley, that file will automatically be renamed in your ALL PDFs folder. you can test it out and see for yourself! This feature is awesome because I will often put PDFs into MEndeley that it doesn’t properly recognize the meta-data - so I will have to manually copy and paste in the author’s name and correct title. Whatever changes I’ve made in Mendeley are updated in the ALL PDFs!
UPDATE - JUNE 15, 2010:
OMG I just discovered a new feature! Mendeley allows you to set a “watched folder” where it automatically imports all PDF’s and if you followed my instructions above for how to tell Mendeley to automatically rename your files, after automatically importing your PDFs it will rename your files also! That means I NEVER have to drag and drop a downloaded PDF into Mendeley again! this saves me sooooo much time! I don’t know when this feature became available but I can’t believe that I misssssssed it! Let’s explore this awesome new function.
Let’s try this out with an excellent piece of scholarship: Jonathan Coopersmith’s article, Does Your Mother Know What You Really Do? The Changing Nature and Image of Computer-Based Pornography, History and Technology, Volume 22, Issue 1 March 2006 , pages 1 - 25.
ok so I assume you’ve already read my June 2nd update that explains how to set Mendeley to automatically rename your files in a new folder for all your pdfs.
1.) go to Mendeley Preferences (top left corner), click on “WATCHED FOLDERS” tab, select the folder where you download your academic files (I call mine downloads for chrome), click on “OK”
2.) download Coopersmith’s article.
3.) your file will then show up in the download folder, right now the file downloaded as “741530078.pdf”
4. watch the file AUTOMATICALLY Show up in your Mendeley! OMG NO MORE DRAGGING! before I had to drag every downloaded file into my Mendeley! this saves sooooo much time! THIS IS AWESOME!
5.) then see the file magically appear in your designated ALL PDFs folder!
Some things to be aware of:
1.) delete downloaded file: you still have to delete the downloaded file from your downloads folder. This is because Mendeley automatically creates a copy of the pdf when it renames it and puts it in the ALL PDF’s folder (or whatever you call yours).
Hey Mendeley team- can you guys create the option to DELETE a file after it is automatically renamed and copies to a new folder?
2.) all pdfs will be imported! Warning - if you set MEndeley to watch your DOWNLOADS folder for automatic PDF import, it will import every single PDF that you download! This can become annoying cuz it doesn’t discrminate beween academic articles vs some PDF that you download from your email or from Google Docs. I realized this after I tried to print from my Google Docs cuz it creates a PDF to print and downloads it to your computer - these PDFs then started showing up in my Mendeley. I suggest that you only use one browser for downloading academic folders and designate a folder JUST for that browser and then set that to be the special downloads folder that Mendeley watches. So for example, I use 3 browsers, firefox, chrome and safari. I have created 3 separate downloads folder for EACH browser. Mendeley only watches my CHROME downloads folder.
Another option is for you to use a firefox downloads manager plugin where you can create separate folders. But my firefox crashes a lot when I add too many plugins and it was laborious to manage the folders - so that’s why I just use 3 separate browsers.
UPDATE September 29, 2010
I’ve written about new academic work flow that now incorporates Calibrae (book organzer) and ipad. My New Academic Workflow With My Ipad, iAnnotate, Mendeley & Dropbox
