Mendeley

Jason, I’ve gotten hooked on Zotero, but I can’t tell if the two programs are trying to do the same thing

http://www.zotero.org

I signed up for Mendeley at one point. It looks like a social networking site customized for researchers (e.g. you can post your papers). I’m not sure whether or not I’d find it useful if it was already widely used in my field. As is, I found it useless.

If someone finds that Mendeley makes them even slightly more productive, I’d be interested to hear about it.

Hi Martin, hi Dan,

there is some overlap with Zotero (we’ll also be working on Zotero compatibility in the future), but there are major differences as well. Whereas Zotero grabs citation information from websites, Mendeley (a free software for Windows, Mac and Linux) grabs them directly from the PDF. Mendeley also extracts the full-text and parses the cited references, which you can then export as BibTex files.

Mendeley allows you to back up your entire research paper database online, so that you can access it through a browser, and also lets you share and collaboratively annotate your research papers. As Dan has pointed out, this also includes a social network for researchers.

However, we believe that the most interesting feature will be statistics and research trends. If you’re familiar with Last.fm, which generates listening statistics and music recommendations based on the listening habits of its users, Mendeley will try to do the same with research papers. You’ll be able to track the most popular/up-and-coming papers and authors in each discipline. Similarly, as an author, you’ll be able to view real-time statistics about your readership (how many readers do you have, from which disciplines/geographic regions are they, what tags are they using to describe your work etc.).

Of course, we’ve only just launched into public beta (version 0.5), so much work remains to be done - but since we’re backed by ex-Skype and Last.fm key personnel, you can expect many interesting developments in the next couple of months.