By Chris Pollette
It may seem like an unusual combination: keeping track of your research and building a social network. That, however, is the dual purpose of Mendeley, a service that helps you document your research while working with others who share similar academic interests.
Because of its social networking aspect, Mendeley requires its users to create an account on its website. Once you’ve done that, you’ll be able to manage your library, much like you would with other tools including Zotero and EndNote. A free basic account gives you up to 500 MB of personal web space and 500 MB of shared web space, though you can upgrade your file storage for a monthly fee.
Building your library is simple. You can add the Mendeley bookmarklet to your web browser to include your online sources. If you’ve downloaded PDF files of journal articles, you can import those documents into your library either via the website or by dragging and dropping PDF files onto the desktop client. The desktop software is compatible with Windows, Macintosh, and Linux operating systems.
Mendeley records citation information automatically from the information embedded in the document. The software compares identifying information from the document to online sources to ensure the citation is as accurate as possible. Speaking of bibliographic details, Mendeley supports more than 1,000 of the most popular citation styles, so there’s a strong chance that whichever style you’ll be using for your work is included. In addition, the service has plugins compatible with many versions of Microsoft Word and its open-source competitor OpenOffice, so you can retrieve citations as you write.
