Re-thinking Mendeley

Alun Digital Academia 8 Comments , ,

I’ve got a blog post I’d like to fin­ish here, but it needs time for me to sit down and write it prop­erly. One of the things that has eaten my time instead is look­ing over Mendeley. In the past I haven’t used it because I haven’t had a need for it. I already have accounts on Zotero, CiteU­Like and I have a copy of Papers for my PDFs. I think this could change as I’ve been work­ing with Mendeley accounts for AoBBlog.

If you visit AoBBlog you’ll see a Bib­li­o­graph­ies option on the menu bar, and drop­ping down from that four options. Three of these are shared col­lec­tions and Pol­lin­a­tion is cur­ated by David Frost, the man­aging editor of the Annals of Bot­any. These are all admin­istered at Mendeley. I’ve set up Ara­bidop­sis, Eco­logy and Nutri­tion as shared col­lec­tions so that when people who know more about Ara­bidop­sis etc. than me sign up, they can keep the bib­li­o­graphy up-to-date. The reason you can see it on the web­site and not have to guess which AoB staff mem­ber is keep­ing the col­lec­tion on Mendeley is that Mendeley now has an API, allow­ing me to pull data out of the site. There’s also a Word­Press plu­gin for Mendeley and that’s how I’ve been able to put some­thing quickly on the web rather than try to delve into JSON myself.

So why care? More