The most laborious part of any research paper for me, and probably for many of you, is making sure that the references are formatted in the proper style. Is the title supposed to be in italics? Do I need a period or a comma here? It has always seemed like exactly the kind of thing that a computer should be able to do for me, and now with Mendeley it can. Mendeley uses a system for formatting references called the Citation Style Language (CSL), which is sort of like HTML, but for citations. With Mendeley, you simply tell your word processor what citation style you want (picking from a library of thousands of styles) and our word processor plugin handles the rest. (more…)

UPDATE: The RFIs have now been posted and there’s a petition opposing the RWA on whitehouse.gov.

The US White House Office of Science and Technology Policy recently issued a Request for Information on their existing policy requiring some federally-funded work to be submitted to Pubmed Central, where it’s freely accessible to the public. We were pleased to have the opportunity to respond and a summary of our response is below. Before getting into that, however, I’d like to take a little detour and talk a little about our mission and how that relates to the scholarly endeavor. Our mission at Mendeley is to help researchers organize research, collaborate easily with colleagues, and discover new research. (more…)

The new year brings some big news! We’ve partnered with Swets, a leading subscription management company, to create the Mendeley Institutional Edition. This tool will allow librarians and institutions to connect their collection directly to researchers; aid collaboration among students, professors, and colleagues; and see the impact of the institution’s research output.

Within their institutional profile, librarians can assist their users in a number of ways:
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Keeping with the Open Access week spirit, we’re taking this opportunity to show you how to publicly share your own research on Mendeley. Making it openly available for others to easily access means they are more likely to cite you in their own publications, and also allows your colleagues to build upon your work faster.

When you sign up for a Mendeley user account, a researcher profile is created for you. On this page, along with your name, academic status, and short bio, you will also see a section titled “Publications”. This section is where you can display work you’ve published or perhaps even work that’s not yet published.

So how do you add your publications to that list? Just drop your papers into the My Publications folder in Mendeley Desktop. Let me show you how, step by step. (more…)

At Mendeley, we want to fit into your workflow as seamlessly as possible. We recently posted an article showing you 7 ways to add documents to your library, so I’m pleased to announce that there’s now yet another way. Publishers such as Highwire Press, BMC, PLoS, Arxiv, Refdoc.fr and others have rolled out a “Share This” button for their sites, which makes adding research to your library as easy as sending a tweet. Read on to see how this works. (more…)

Here’s a problem some of you may be familiar with. You’re browsing the Mendeley research catalog and you come across a really great paper, or maybe you see an update from one of your colleagues pointing to something you’d like to read, only to find that you have to leave Mendeley to log in to your library’s website and search all over again to be able to download the actual paper. It’s a little jarring to switch interfaces like that, and more than a little inefficient. Fret no more, my friends. (more…)

This post is the third post in a series of posts designed to introduce you to the new information organization, discovery, and retrieval concepts in Mendeley. In part 1 we discussed tags and filters and in part 2 we discussed the idea of search as an interface to your research. Today I’d like to talk a little about another feature that has become common to information organization and discovery tools – the activity feed.

The benefits of online research are obvious (more…)

Get your work noticed! Adding your publications to your profile helps get your work found. More and more often, people aren’t looking to journal table of contents or library catalogs when they search for research. They’re watching what their friends and colleagues bookmark on social networks or add to groups on Mendeley, and they’re searching Google Scholar. In order to get your work noticed, you need to be present where people are looking. There are a few ways you can do this, but like many things, just showing up counts for more than you would think. Simply having an account and connecting to your colleagues online can position you to get found more often, but also to find more interesting things you wouldn’t have noticed otherwise. With hundreds of papers being published in my field every week, I couldn’t keep up using a pure search strategy.

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A useful way to keep your contacts up to date on what you’re doing online is to have services tweet out your activity. Now Mendeley will send tweets on your behalf if you add a publication to the “My Publications” folder or comment or like something in a public group newsfeed. You can activate this on your Account Settings page and pick and choose which activities you’d like to have tweeted on your behalf.

Another small but useful change is the addition of permalinks to activity feed items, making it easier to call attention to a specific item in the feed. You’ll find those attached to the date for each item. We’ve also made lots of under-the-hood fixes and improvements to the API. Please note that with this release, we’re also officially dropping support for IE6.

This post is the second in a series, looking back over the changes in information management over the past decade. Three major and interrelated developments are the move to querying databases of information as opposed to loading information from individual files, the practice of tagging bits of information as opposed to filing things in a hierarchical folder structure, and the representation of information as a temporal stream as opposed to a static page. This post is about the move to databases from filing systems, and how that improves your workflow. (more…)