I have been using Mendeley since last one and half year and
during this time have a total collection of more than 300 papers related to my
research work. So with my experience of using Mendeley, I am sharing some tips
for more user friendly use of Mendeley.
Mendeley is a reference
management tool that lets you make collection and organize research papers, read
them in an interactive way by taking notes and generate citation for papers in
more than 2000 different citation style that Mendeley have in its collection.
Currently it is owned by Elsevier, but the software’s desktop version is freely
downloadable. The cloud version gives 2GB of free space. Mendeley’s cloud
version gives a social network like interface where user can directly interact with
other scholars, or form a group for sharing research related literature, or
search the worldwide Mendeley library. Because of this SNS like feature Mendeley
readership is now a part of the new trend of research evaluation known as the
Altmetrics or Article Level Metrices.
So today here I am sharing some tips which can enhance your
Mendeley uses experience.
- Always sign in and keep syncing your Mendeley desktop
collection to Mendeley web, you all know the obvious benefit of that.
- Always check the details of the papers are correct or not
while importing them to Mendeley. Mendeley have a very strong metadata
extraction feature, by which it extract the metadata elements of a paper like
authors, journal name, volume, issue etc. But some time it fails to do so. So every
time you import a paper don't forget to check the details and correct them if
necessary. Because this may lead to inaccurate citation and inaccurate citation
may lead to plagiarism also.
- It’s a possibility that during your research career you
will come across hundreds of paper. So Manage your collection in an order which
you personally can understand, after all its your own personnel digital library One tip is you can arrange the research papers based on some folder based
approach. For example if you are writing a review paper, say about the
"History of Digital Library" and your review paper will cover these
subheadings like Introducion, History of Digital Library, Technical feasibility
and Metadata Issues. First make a Master folder and dump all the papers that
you think is essential for you for the study. Then make some sub folders under
the master folder and name the subfolders according to the subheadings that you
are going to cover in that review paper. So here in this case the name of the
subfolders will be Introduction, History of Digital Library , Technical
feasibility, Metadata Issues as per your review's subheading. Then after
reading the papers from the master folder you will know which paper is essential
for which part, then accordingly you arrange them to the folders of your
choice.
- This type of arrangement will help you in more focused
reading and easy arrangement of the literature in your thesis or research
paper. Also while putting citation using the word plugin, you will find your
papers more easily.
- Make best use of the Note making facility of Mendeley for
each paper. Make an abstract note using you own language for each paper.
Actually you can directly make the final lines that you are going to write from
that paper in your review. This will reduce the time while you will write the final
paper, you just need to copy paste those notes to your paper. This also helps
to kick start your research work especially if you had a long break in between
your research.
- Add your own personnel keywords to each paper, as this
will help you in accurate searching of the papers of your need in your own
library. Bcause the keywords you make, becomes part of the Mendeley index.
