Mendeley

I’ve just had Mendeley_com start to follow me on Twitter. Not quite sure how they found me, but Mendeley itself claims to be social software for managing & storing research papers. In itself, perhaps it’s not that new, there are other academically slanted social bookmarking etc., tools (e.g. Connotea, Scholar [which can be integrated with Blackboard, which may make it less useful for researchers, but potentially more useful for student researchers] or CiteUlike).
The guys (and they do all seem to be guys) who’ve set this up seem to primarily be UK based (so a little interesting to see how few UK researchers have registered so far.) They say that they’re trying to work with some of the founders of Skype & Last.fm – who clearly were good at getting networks working.
I’ll register.

5 thoughts on “Mendeley”

  1. Hi Emma,

    hope this doesn’t look like stalking – our Google Alerts just pointed me to this blog post! To answer your first question – after our latest release (beta 0.6), we’re actively looking to reach out to academic bloggers and librarians (I recently presented Mendeley at a bunch of US universities, see http://snurl.com/9on3y), that’s how we found you.

    Also please let me add to what you wrote. We don’t see ourselves primarily as a social network, but rather as a research management tool. What differentiates us from CiteULike or Connotea (both of whom we know quite well) is that we offer desktop software which can be used to manage research papers already stored on your hard drive.

    The neat thing is the automatic processing that Mendeley Desktop does with PDFs – it extracts and indexes the full-text, tries to recognize the metadata automatically, and also parses the cited references. Moreover, you can use Mendeley to share and collaboratively annotate PDFs, and we have a “cite-while-you-write” Word plugin. Since we only just got started, feedback of any kind is very much appreciated: http://feedback.mendeley.com.

    Also, just to clarify – we’re already working with some of the founders behind Skype & Last.fm (they’re our investors and board members). We’ll be announcing additional investors shortly. As for the “guys” thing: We wish we had more girls working here in our London office! But we only seem to get male applicants… We’re currently hiring, by the way, so if you know anyone, send them our way: http://www.startuply.com/Jobs/C_Software_Engineer_Central_London_UK__794_1.aspx

    If you have any further questions, please just let me know!
    Thanks and best wishes from London,
    Victor

  2. Thanks for the comments – I’ll certainly have a closer look. When I’d found it this morning, I was using my OLPC … rather than the laptop I keep most of my research work on – so I didn’t really look at the installable components.

    I also wondered why, when you have a fairly large UK set of programmers, that the job roles use the US terminology. The ability to select a role from local terminology would be good. So, I selected Professor, though I’m not one here – but there wasn’t a “lecturer” – and anyway, I know that a Lecturer in the US is a different case to a UK lecturer.

    I’ll blog again, once I get to grips a bit more with it!

  3. That’s a good point regarding the terminology. I’ll add it to our feedback system! Looking forward to hearing your thoughts once you’ve tried Mendeley Desktop….

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