Mendeley
Academic software for organizing, sharing, and generating bibliographies for research papers.
What is Mendeley?
Mendeley helps manage and share academic knowledge: Mendeley Desktop is free academic software (Windows, Mac, Linux) for organizing and sharing research papers and generating bibliographies with 1GB of free online storage to automatically back up and synchronize your library across desktop, web and mobile. Mendeley Web is a free research network which lets you manage research papers online, discover trends and connect to like-minded academics. Mendeley tracks usage data on over 40 million research papers in real-time, thus creating a network of people using and sharing millions of scholarly articles - helping to shift research into the 21st century world of collaboration and openness. Mendeley is engendering a revolution in the way research is conducted and disseminated, changing the face of science.
With Mendeley you can view and annotate PDF files. The PDF exported along with the comments can be readily viewed in Adobe's Reader.
Mendeley Screenshots
Mendeley Features
Comments and Reviews
Tags
- Library
- Research Manager
- papers
- bibliography-management
- citation-management
- citation-maker
- academic
- Research
- pdf-organizer
- research-network
- Reference
- collaboration
- reference-apps
- english-only
Although there are some bugs in Mendeley desktop and web import and also basic storage plan is very less, it provides all other features without bugging to take premium.
I love Mendeley for creating and sharing references. A must-have tool for all University students.
mendeley is really easy to use. and excellent retrieval of metadata. but: there is ONE big disadvantage. when you create comments in PDFs, mendeley does not export them. that means you cannot use PDFs and comments in other software. you are locked-in. source: http://www.docear.org/2013/10/14/what-makes-a-bad-reference-manager/ (i tried the export and it's true, comments in pdfs are exported in a crappy format).
i use zotero instead. not that easy to use but open source and excellent community. docear also looks nice.
Mendeley got infamous for encrypting its local database, making switching to competing products more difficult. The claims of Elsevier, Mendeleys owner, in reaction to questions were perceived as "bizzare" and "Anti-Science"
[Edited by superluminar, January 17]
If you do a lot of archival research and/or citing of non-published sources (personal correspondence, manuscripts, etc.) in your work, I would not recommend Mendeley. It does not contain the fields you would need to properly cite that kind of material. Zotero is the best alternative I've found for that kind of reference/source management.
Since I believe that the comparison chart in em4020's review from August 2012 provides a slightly biased picture, I would like to introduce some more (slightly biased) comparison charts :-):
To those who didn't yet realize it: All these charts were created by the developers of the software tools being compared (also the one in em4020's review). I recently wrote about this problem in my Blog http://www.docear.org/2013/08/27/off-topic-which-one-is-the-best-reference-management-software-tool/
[Edited by joeran, October 30]
A complete Comparison you find on http://www.mendeley.com/compare-mendeley/