Useful TIPS for Enhancing your Mendeley Experience!!

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.

1. Always sign in and keep syncing your Mendeley desktop collection to Mendeley web, you all know the obvious benefit of that.
2. 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.
3. 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.                                                                                                
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.