Before I was using iTunes, organizing my music had to be done by hand. I created folders and subfolders that felt superficial and inaccurate: should that new Franz Ferdinand album go to /Alternative/Britpop, or was /Rock/2000s a better place? I created and maintained playlists manually in Winamp. Needless to say, this took a lot of time, so the introduction of iTunes felt like a true relief from all the tedious aspects of music management I had come to know and loathe. Now, my library is searchable in an instant, folders are maintained automatically and smart playlists keep track of the songs I play and like the most.
But mp3s were not the only filetype I was struggling with before a nifty and clever program saved my day… I would like to introduce to you, the pdf. As a student in the natural sciences, you’ll quickly become familiar with the preferred method of communication between scientists: scientific articles in the form of pdf-files a couple MBs big. Obtaining scientific knowledge nowadays involves downloading and reading these articles, from sites indexing scientific publications, like pubmed. As with music, the amount of articles I downloaded started cluttering and defying my carefully organized folders (where the /HAVE-TO-READ/ folder quickly obtained a reputation of articles that disapeared, to never return again).
Needless to say, I was immensely relieved when Mendeley (an aggregation of the names of famous scientists Mendel and Mendeleyev) came around the corner to solve all my troubles: like iTunes, Mendeley indexes and organizes like a champ, making articles searchable by author’s name, topic and publication outlet. On top of this, Mendeley supports a citation plugin for MS Word, which has been really stable and functional since the last two releases.
But there’s more: when you login to the Mendeley website, you’ll find that you’re library has found its place online, making it easy to share publications with colleagues that are also using Mendeley. The stuff that’s really nifty is at the statistics page. You can see which papers are hot amongst fellow scientists, which journals these articles are from and which tags people have been using to describe papers. Thanks to this feature, I came across an article that’s not exactly ground-breaking science, but is really useful nonetheless on Error Bars in Experimental Biology. These features really add another layer on top of the data management aspect: it provides insight into what articles are read when amongst scientists. It will be interesting to see how this feature will develop in the future, and whether it could play a role in re-defining views of journal impact factors, in a time were open-access and traditional publishers are reshaping the very nature of peer-reviewed scientific publishing.
To all scientists out there, I would like to heartily recommend Mendeley for your article-management needs!
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Thanks for the kind words, Lucas! It’s widely understood that impact factors as a ranking are broken, so Mendeley’s stats could be a useful replacement. Looking at the ranking of the top 5 journals in the biological sciences, the effect of Open Access on PLoS is already emerging.
Exactly! I think it would be great if Mendeley would contribute to a more fair judgement of scientific merit. By integrating the best of a scientific social networks and useful data management capabilities, I believe you’re on the right track. The best of luck for your team and Mendeley!