text: Karin Clavel

What is Mendeley?

Mendeley is a (free) web service for online reference management & reference sharing. With Mendeley you can easily store references to papers, books or even websites. You can work with the web-based version, which comes with a handy bookmarklet to instantly add references to your Mendeley Library without typing. Alternatively, you can install Mndeley Desktop and add references by simply dragging and dropping PDFs. You could also create a watch folder; any PDF added to the watch folder will be imported into your library.

The references and even the PDFs can be backed up online, with 1GB storage for free. This also allows you to access your library from any computer and even from your iPhone or iPad. If the storage is not enough, you can move to a paid premium account, or you could set up Dropbox  as your storage file.

Mendeley automatically fills in important information, such as authors, titles, journal, abstract, keywords and also the URL or the full text PDF.

Collaboration and academic networking

You can create a public or private group and invite the people you work with to share your references, but also annotations, tags and notes. The service will keep track of the activity within the group. You can join existing public groups and get in contact with people with a similar research interest worldwide.

Further Reading