Mendeley is actually a very sophisticated research management tool and free to use. It has had a great deal of developments since it was invented until now.
It was founded in November 2007 and is based in London. The first public beta version was released in August 2008. The team comprises researchers, graduates, and open source developers from a variety of academic institutions, although the software itself is not open source. The company’s investors include the former executive chairman of Last.fm, the former founding engineers of Skype, and the former Head of Digital Strategy at Warner Music Group, as well as academics from Cambridge and Johns Hopkins University.
According to an article which was written by Xenia on the September 4th of the 2009, she points out that Mendeley is just a new fun toy. Although she recognizes that Mendeley is a good tool either for scientist or people who are interested on that topic. She wants to show somehow this gadget can be used as an e-learning tool for like-minded non-academics and students alike even if it is more presented for researchers.
Like all social networking systems, Mendeley will improve its performance and practicality with the growth of its user base.
Mendeley has got some many features;
• The Mendeley site has a clean look, so it doesn’t overwhelm new users with cluttered information or distract and interrupt the workflow, also the software is easy to install and use.
• Mendeley indexes and organizes your PDF files and research papers like a playlist. You can tag, search and filter your documents and group them into labeled collections. Mendeley integrates an academic software component with a Web-based research network, which also functions as a backup system that’s in sync with the digital bibliography on your computer. This means you can work on your project or paper at home, on a shared campus library computer or anywhere you have Internet access.
• You can import old document details and citations through CiteULike and add new ones including, when possible, PDF files with a click of a bookmarklet in your browser.
• You can create bibliographies in Word and OpenOffice.
• Ultimately the makers of Mendeley would like to enable the program to automatically extract metadata and cited references from PDFs.
Her favourite features are the next ones:
• Full-text search, viewer and annotation tool: Mendeley lets you highlight and annotate your PDF files with sticky notes in the internal PDF-viewer of Mendeley desktop. The new version will enable the synchronization of the annotated versions with colleagues. This, in believes is a great potential for collaborative work, just as
• Sharing academic papers: For university. Mendeley might be enriching for different kinds of open educational projects, by enabling users to communicate about their reading habits and sharing their thoughts about specific text-passages in the assigned literature. Mendeley will eventually implement a group feature for the shared document collections, so that filesharing could be discussed in a blog-like or wiki-like format (German Interview with a co-founder of Mendeley).
• Research statistics: Since Mendeley anonymously collects and analyzes the data users provide through the use of their online bibliographies on Mendeley Web, Mendeley can share information about the reading behavior of the scientific community and research trends with you. This isn’t as trivial as it sounds and might change how research is conducted and eventually mediated. This is a major reason for me to use Mendeley; it might change “the journal impact factor through real-time transparent statistics.”
• Recommendation engines: Mendeley can have educational value by being a virtual teacher, who can point to undiscovered intellectual terrain within the field of the students interest.
• Open-Access: Although Mendeley will not be a platform to share documents as Napster shared music files, researchers are encouraged to post their own papers on their profiles, thereby making them publicly available.
So to sum up, we could say that Xenia is really impressed by Mendelay. She is enticed by the perspectives Mendeley gives for working and learning.
She also claims that not only is it a handy referencing tool, there are other products equally usable, it might change how scientists research and communicate with each other. Thereby, Mendeley can enhance university-level e-learning by anonymously aggregating metadata of the papers read and making the statistics available to its users and in future even making recommendations.
REFERENCES:
• The page of Moodle on Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/moodle
• Moodle Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendeley
• Link which is based on this work:
Read more: http://blogcritics.org/scitech/article/software-review-mendeley-mdash-the-free/#ixzz1cw0UR9ih
• Picture of Mendelay’s icon http://www.google.es/imgres?q=MENDELEY&um=1&hl=es&sa=N&biw=1366&bih=569&noj=1&tbm=isch&tbnid=I2l53yqzrXjcfM:&imgrefurl=http://www.aquic.com.ar/page/3/&docid=GCaTBDP-nGsltM&imgurl=http://www.aquic.com.ar/wp-content/uploads/Mendeley_Logo_highres.png&w=377&h=345&ei=Sp62ToeCJumI4gS9vNHvAw&zoom=1&iact=rc&dur=440&sig=110845177832462444796&page=1&tbnh=115&tbnw=111&start=0&ndsp=21&ved=1t:429,r:4,s:0&tx=56&ty=32
• Picture of Mendeley in the computer : http://www.google.es/imgres?q=MENDELEY&um=1&hl=es&sa=N&biw=1366&bih=569&noj=1&tbm=isch&tbnid=jy14R9jxWUV33M:&imgrefurl=http://mendeley-desktop.softonic.com/&docid=iZEHpjKdGcGkaM&imgurl=http://imagenes.es.sftcdn.net/es/scrn/86000/86094/mendeley-desktop-32.jpg&w=700&h=496&ei=Sp62ToeCJumI4gS9vNHvAw&zoom=1&iact=rc&dur=398&sig=110845177832462444796&page=1&tbnh=108&tbnw=153&start=0&ndsp=21&ved=1t:429,r:2,s:0&tx=83&ty=62
Filed under: Social networks, Web Communication Tagged: features, Management tool, Mendelay, Social Network 
