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Chemistry Chat
Mendeley, A Reference Manager and Social Network
Soichi Tokizane, Library and Information Science, Faculty of Letters, Aichi University
1. Mendeley for Reference Management
Most researchers store copies of reference articles in the form of PDF today. PDF copies occupy less space than paper copies, but it is harder to dig out necessary articles. Thus researchers often use so-called reference managers to organize references which they collected.
Commercially-available reference mangers such as EndNote and RefWorks have been quite popular among researchers, while a new-comer, Mendeley, is mentioned more and more recently. Mendeley, a free tool, consists of Mendeley Desktop for PC and Mac, and Mendeley Web for browsers. Through synchronization, one can view stored articles at work, at home, or even while traveling on your iPad.
Figure 1. Mendeley Desktop
Figure 2. Mendeley Web
To register your references, you may simply drag-and-drop your PDFs to the Mendeley Desktop. It will analyze those PDFs, extract necessary data, check the Web for correct bibliographic data, and register them into your PC/Mac. Mendeley Web has a registration tool, Web Importer, which works similarly. After you find a document via a web search, click "Web Importer" in your Bookmark. Registered PDFs are stored in your library under appropriate category folders which you defined. You may sort PDFs by author names or search by keywords. You can store any documents in addition to PDF, such as Word documents, or PowerPoint slides.
Japanese documents had been difficult to register, because Mendeley had difficulty in analyzing Japanese-language PDFs. Now a web tool, "Japanese Articles to Mendeley", helps register Japanese articles.
Figure 3. "Japanese Articles to Mendeley"
You can even create reference lists using the MS Word Plugin from your Mendeley database. There are already reference templates for more than 1000 journals.
2. Mendeley as a Database
Mendeley Web has a search box named, "Paper", though which you may search relevant articles from the vast collection of documents which have been registered by Mendeley users worldwide. If the articles found are open access, you may be able to store such PDFs directly to your library. If not, you can store bibliographic data at least. Any references you have registered to your library are thus a part of this global collection. If you are a researcher of a private corporation, you may want to use Mendeley Desktop without synchronization to protect research secrets.
Figure 4. Search result of "Chemical Dictionary" at Mendeley Web
3. Mendeley as a Social Network
Mendeley is a social network. You are encouraged to register your profile with Mendeley, create a research group network, and share your comments and references. This is a new way of conducting research globally.
Mendeley is not only a reference manager, but also a powerful research tool. Please try Mendeley and enjoy using it.
Figure 5. The author's profile at Mendeley
Figure 6. Mendeley Group
Introduction of the author
Soichi Tokizane
Professor, Library and Information Science, Faculty of Letters, Aichi University
[Biography] Master degree in chemistry at the Faculty of Science, the University of Tokyo. Job histroy includes Toray, the Japan Association for International Chemical Information (JAICI), Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST).
A member of the Advisory Board on Science and Technology Literature of the National Diet Library.
Authored books such as "Searching chemical literature and database in the internet era", "Using SciFinder", and "Internet for Science Students"
Majors in chemical information, and library and information science
[Biography] Master degree in chemistry at the Faculty of Science, the University of Tokyo. Job histroy includes Toray, the Japan Association for International Chemical Information (JAICI), Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST).
A member of the Advisory Board on Science and Technology Literature of the National Diet Library.
Authored books such as "Searching chemical literature and database in the internet era", "Using SciFinder", and "Internet for Science Students"
Majors in chemical information, and library and information science