If you are an academic or student looking for the best research tool in the World Wide Web, it’s high time you and Mendeley desktop get to know each other. This is the tool you need to make every research work as smooth as possible.
If Mendeley is new to your ears, you’re in for a treat. Let’s discuss what it can do — how to use it to its full potential to give your research skills a bump.
What is Mendeley Desktop?
Mendeley is the desktop application part of the research ecosystem of Mendeley. This software is based on your desktop computer and is different from the web interface or smartphone apps.
Of course, Mendeley mobile apps are also an integral aspect of the overall system. The cloud infrastructure is the glue that holds it all together. We’re also going to touch on these other elements of the overall operation, but the key issue at hand is the desktop framework.
All Your References in One Platform
Mendeley Desktop is a reference management platform at its core. You can’t do anything with the program until you have a root database. As it can be difficult to manually enter the specifics of each source, Mendeley Desktop has several neat tools to help expedite the process.
Most academic articles are in the form of a PDF document. You can set up specific folders on your hard drive to be monitored by Mendeley Desktop. Any PDFs that you copy to this folder will be ingested into your database automatically.
Mendeley will attempt to extract the correct information from the document automatically, even if each PDF has a very different format. You may need to make sure the details are right, so this will save you a lot of time in the long run.
If you do need to insert the source manually, often you can just key in the title and then mark the source as “needing review.” Mendeley then reviews the title against Google Scholar and automatically fills in all the details if it finds a contest.
You can also make sure you build custom lists for your sources. The first time you join new research outlets in Mendeley, all this goes into an unsorted bin. This isn’t a perfect way to end something when you’re working on several articles.
Notes and Annotations
After loading a new research paper into your Mendeley folder, you can highlight relevant pieces of text and leave notes for yourself and your team members.
This is a vital feature of everyone undertaking academic research. When you do your analysis, hundreds of references will be accumulating. It is important to highlight all the bits that are pertinent to your own paper and to keep an orderly track of your thoughts at the time when reading the study of others.
Mendeley Desktop’s Automated Citation
Ask someone who has to do scholarly research, and they’re going to tell you that one of the most tiresome aspects of this writing is trying to do citations and bibliographies at the end of the piece. One of the great things about Mendeley Desktop is that you can simplify nearly all of your quotation functions.
What you need to do is be careful in compiling all the analysis references in your Mendeley folder. So when you write your article, you can use the Mendeley Desktop plugins in your word processor to attach citations as you go.
The true magic comes after you’re finished, and you have to bring together a list of references or a bibliography. If you put all the citations in your piece as you go along, you only need to press a single button to automatically create the entire source list in the proper academic citation format.
It’s not that big a deal with shorter articles, but if we’re talking about a complete thesis or a long research paper with hundreds of references, it seems like the best feature ever made.
Mendeley for Research Teams
Mendeley Desktop is ideal for students who work independently on thesis assignments as well as researchers who write and publish on their own. However, the movement is largely towards co-publishing with other academics these days.
Mendeley has some excellent interactive resources that allow people to gather literature, share annotations, and otherwise share the burden of study. Not only does this mean that you’re going to get work done quicker, but it also means that you can learn from other members of the team who are more seasoned researchers than you are.
Mendeley Will Help You Locate Valuable Papers
No matter what academic discipline you pursue, it’s important to keep up-to-date with the latest research. Mendeley is an extremely useful tool to discover new articles that you can read. The functionality is called Mendeley Suggest and uses your personal profile, along with a system that tracks which papers are read and quoted the most, to make recommendations to you when it comes to your reading list.
You’ll see posts that have a big effect on your profession that you should definitely read. This is a big move ahead of the old way of writing analysis. Of course, you’re not expected to rely on anything like Mendeley Suggest by itself.
There’s an explanation why the scholarly publishing company Elsevier has purchased Mendeley and why it’s been so successful over the years. This piece of software takes a lot of time out of research and scholarly writing. Not only will this make you a more effective academic, but it will also make you more inspired to actively write!
Knowing that the time-consuming aspects of the work are automated or much easier means that you can feel a feeling of enthusiasm about writing your research instead of a sense of fear.
Mendeley: Free versus Premium
In the past, Mendeley’s free edition has had some very severe drawbacks. Nowadays, though, the biggest distinction between the free option and the paid service is the amount of cloud storage you receive. Free users get two gigabytes of cloud storage while premium users get ever-increasing amounts depending on how much they pay.
Free users will have the option to set up five private groups of up to 25 staff. If you need bigger collaboration groups or a lot of cloud storage, you’re more likely to have some kind of formal authorization for Mendeley because you’re either working for a university or a research organization. Try to consult with the institution before you pay for it yourself.