1. Mendeley: iTunes for your .pdfs
Why is Mendeley so cool? Because it’s like iTunes for research papers — if iTunes let you access your musical library remotely, annotate albums and share them with friends.
Mendeley’s goal is to create a giant network of socially-annotated research libraries. Its aim is fostering interaction and connection among researchers in all fields. Store your unmanageable collection of pdfs and share them with your research team. Save notes and comments, then avail them to others.
But the best feature — at least for those of us drowning in pdfs — is the possibility to organize digital docs by topic, or according to the different articles you’re writing. By making comments and research notes available along with research article metadata and citations, this tool will bring joy to the lives of many researchers — that is, once all the social features are up and running (it’s still a relatively new service).
Finally, Mendeley replicates aspects of web-based reference managers: by extracting, storing and exporting references from the library, it allows users to quickly create formatted bibliographies. But it’s more complimentary to these services than competitive; you can import and export citations, for example, between Mendeley and CiteUlike and Zotero.
Sadly, like iTunes, it can’t extract data from everything you drop on. A recent test found this reviewer manually editing reference information for 00034bdg.pdf. It should be especially helpful for teaching and collaborative paper writing, since it allows a team of researchers to share references and store them in a commonly accessed collection.
-Milan Stankovic, PhD@hypios
2. CiteULike: Spreading the Bibliographic Metadata
Unless keeping track of citations with index cards is your thing, you’re probably using either a web-based citation manager (Connotea, CiteUlike, Zotero) or the popular but costly EndNote. Whatever you’re using, here’s probably what you want to be able to do: extract and export citational data from any web-based document (blog post, JSTOR article) as easily as you can retweet or Digg. Then you want to be able to access citations (wherever you are) to whip-up a perfectly formatted bibliography in the time it takes to put together a playlist.
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Actually this started as a blogproject. I thought FAQs a subject rich and specific enough to justify a whole blog but I realized that I wouldn’t have enough time to maintain it. So I decided to just merge my first post onto the hypios blog. If someone wants to start an FAQ blog, I’d love to hear from you.
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