Monomorphic

Following a comment on my previous foray into bibliography management systems, I had a look at the product known as Mendeley.

In order to evaluate Mendeley, let’s ask ourselves what we want from a bibliography management system in the modern research environment. At a bare minimum, we want an easy way to catalogue and search PDF documents, and of course compile the all-important reference list at the end of the laborious writing process. Mendeley does this, as well as bring a social networking aspect into the picture. It tries to recommend papers that are relevant to your work, as well as give you an easy way of sharing interesting papers with colleagues.

In contrast to Aigaion, which I wrote about previously, Mendeley is not a web based system but a desktop application. This definitely has benefits as the interface is quite slick. I can set the application to watch my “papers folder”, and any PDFs I save to that folder, or its subfolders, will automatically be scanned and entered into Mendeley. Metadata, such as author, title and references, is automatically extracted from the document in most cases, though I found I had to manually revise it sometimes. There’s a built in command that searches for the metadata by paper title on Google Scholar, which comes in very handy in such cases.

Mendeley is built around an internal PDF viewer where the user can highlight text, add little stickies with notes, and so on. This works quite smoothly, but on the Mac platform, it’s definitely not as polished as the Mac’s built in Preview PDF viewer. Mendeley is using its own PDF rendering layer, and it shows in the slower loading times when you scroll the documents. Some additional work could be done here. This is my only major complaint so far, though.

Much like the Evernote application, Mendeley has the option of storing all the papers on a central server, so that I can easily access them (and any annotations I might have made) from a different computer by signing in with my user name and password and then syncing the files. This means I don’t have to give up the benefits I get from a centralized server. It might be nice, however, to have the option of running my own Mendeley server, so I’m not dependent on the Mendeley company’s server somewhere – but then I would forgo the social networking benefits of course.

This application has similarities to how last.fm is used for music, in that people build a profile based on what they consume. Indeed, Mendeley is describing itself as a last.fm for research (video presentation). Let’s compare research and music as forms of media.

• Most music listeners probably don’t make their own music – most people who read research papers probably write their own papers.
• Songs sample other songs (the remix culture), but it’s relatively recent – researchers have always done this in order to establish basic credibility.
• The atomic unit of music is the song. The atomic unit of research is the research paper (the PDF in today’s internet based world, at least in my discipline) – but could this change in the future? Do we have to constrain ourselves to the article format?

In summary, Mendeley is probably the most useful, workflow friendly bibliography system I’ve tried so far. If you’re in research, I’d recommend you give it a try. If I get time, I plan to also investigate a more Mac-centric tool called Sente in the future.

The Savage Minds blog recommends that you don’t use Mendeley as your main tool yet due to its relative immaturity, but I have seen no showstopper bugs so far.