« New Oral Cancer Tests: Crucial or Wasteful? | Main | Dental Patent #1: 1876, Dental Articulators »
February 03, 2009
Mendeley--research AND social networking
Do you have a lot of PDFs that you've never gotten around to organizing? Have you ever wondered which article "014529dk6.pdf" really is? Do you want to share papers with colleagues, without emailing them every time you find something of interest? Mendeley is for you!
A relatively new program, still in beta, Mendeley works with Macs, PCs, & the Linux operating system. It lets you manage your papers online, discover research trends, connect with other researchers in your field, and coming soon, learn about the readership of your own publications: how many readers you have, what disciplines they're in, & where they're from.
You can insert citations & create bibliographies in your Word documents using Mendeley, although it is a much less sophisticated system than EndNote, for example. But you can export the information that you collect through Mendeley into other citation management programs, if you wish.
You can also add a public profile & follow other researchers profile updates (think LinkedIn or Facebook)
I've tried this & it's great fun to drop in a group of PDFs into my library & watch the program extract the meta data, creating entries without my having to do a thing--it really is like magic. And, with a few extra keystrokes, I also added the references cited in these papers to my library.
To try Mendeley yourself, follow this link.
Posted by cshannon at February 3, 2009 10:12 AM