As a followup from Switching from Word to Latex: A Few Thoughts, a few words about using Mendeley.
Mendeley is trying to be for academics what last.fm is for music fans. When I graduated in 2008 it still wasn’t that stable, but since then I have used it exclusively as citation management software. Today, I’ll write a bit how I incorporate it into my literature review process and how it fits in with writing.
What does it do?
It recognizes academic papers or other literature pieces. To me, this is the killer function. Simply copy a paper into your Mendeley folder and it will try and recognize what it is. This saves you a lot of typing time. Once you have your source in the library, it also syncs the actual file to the Mendeley servers, if you want this. Online you can see what others are reading or publishing, as well as search for papers. This give it that added social component, which is cool. What is great is that you can import a document into your library with a single click from the online library. The web importer is also great: simply click the bookmarklet and Mendely will add the currently viewed tab in your browser to your library, often recognizing the content (e.g.: authors, date, title, etc). As easy as that. You can also create folders or groups of papers. More on this later.
Bookmarklet importing a web source
Citations
Next, and probably most interesting if you using Word for writing, is that you can download and install a plugin that allows Mendeley to grab citation details from your library and put these in Word, Neo and Open Office. If you are using a citation style such as Harvard (Author, Date) this might not be a big deal, but for IEEE or ACM papers that use numerical citation styles (e.g.: [2,4,5]), this will save you a lot of work. Even with Harvard-like styles, you might end up combing through your text, trying to find sources that are missing in the bibliography. This process is automatic in Mendeley and all the used sources will appear in the bibliography automatically, in the stipulated format, from which there are quite few to choose from.
Citing is easy. Once the plugin is installed you get a menu option in your word processor of choice. When clicked, this takes you to Mendeley and allows you to select one or more sources. Once you selected, you are taken back to Word where your citations have appeared (in the text and bibliography).
Less than 100 citations seem to work fine in a document but I find that it starts getting worse from there. As for the library size it works fine with medium sized sets of sources, but I have noticed that once you get to 1k of sources in your library, startup can be sluggish. I have also given up on trying to make sure I don’t have duplicates and wrong meta data.
Groups
Mendeley Groups
I’d recommend groups for every new project, but try and not be too enthusiastic with adding sources if you are not actually using them in your text. Your groups get messy and you lose all oversight. In order to keep things accurate, I make sure that all the documents in a particular active folder is in a pristine state. Doing so for your entire library feels little futile. Just make sure that what you cite is correct.
TLDR: Mendeley is great for managing and organizing your sources. It saves you a lot of time in formatting citations for your text. Works well with Word.
