Mendeley is a desktop application (very similar to Mekentosj Papers in this respect), a cloud-based community for backup, storage and sharing of papers and a scientific social network (a bit facebook, a bit LinkedIn).
The desktop application curates your collection of pdfs:
The panel on the top left contains your list of folders and public groups (see below for more on these), the bottom left panel enables you to search by author, author's keywords, journal or personal tags in your tag-cloud. The middle panel displays the documents in whatever folde is open and the right panel shows the metadata for the selected paper (title, author, tags, abstract etc.). Clicking on the pdf symbol next to a reference opens the reading screen:
Here you have the option to read fullscreen, as well as edit metadata on the right as well as highlight and annotate the paper itself (very handy!). Mendeley tabs all the references you may have open at any one time, making it simple to flip between them.
Importing papers is simple. You can either drag a pdf into your libary or select the 'Add Documents' button in the library screen. Mendeley then adds the pdf to your library, checks for metadata and automatically fills out Title, author, publication etc. This isn't perfect but it nearly always works and is improving - it's simple enough to edit incorrect entries: Mendeley lets you search Google Scholar with the title to fill out these fields if it can't find the reference in its catalogue. Best of all, Mendeley copies the pdf into a folder in its area of your hardrive and renames it in a format of your choosing: 'j.1365-294X.2011.05127.pdf' now becomes 'Legrand et al 2011 Molecular Ecology.pdf' for instance. These are stored in nested folders with a structure of your choosing.
This is all fantastic, and the cross-platform nature (there are Windows, OS X and Linux versions of Mendeley Desktop as well as iPhone and iPad apps to read your papers on the move) beats all competition hands-down, but Mendeley really comes into its own with its use of the cloud. Firstly, Mendeley allows you to sync your files between multiple computers - just click 'Sync' in the desktop app and all your references are downloaded. Amazing - no more carting around an external hard drive full of pdfs so you can work at home.
Mendeley is also great for collaboration: you can search for other users by email address and add your colleagues. You can then make groups or shared folders of references (complete with a facebook-like wall for discussion) with your collaborators. I use this feature to help run our journal club - it works brilliantly!
Finally, you can make a public profile to go with your Mendeley web presence:
Neat. This will make it easier for my colleagues to find me and share references.
Mendeley also does citation management. You can either export folders as Bibtex lists, copy and paste individual citations from the software itself, or install the plugin for Microsoft Word or Open Office. This lasst option is so easy to use its unreal. In Word:
Alt+M brings up a dialogue box where you can search your library
Select the appropriate reference and it is added. When you've finished the document, use the insert bibliography option in Word:
Very cool. The reference style is customizable too.
These three bits of technology: Geneious, Google Reader and Mendeley save me HOURS of time and countless headaches and mean I sometimes actually enjoy working at a computer. No mean feat.
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