Mendeley Desktop

Name: Mendeley Desktop
Rating: 3 (10 reviews)

1.19.5

03 May 2019

Research management tool.

Overview

Mendeley Desktop is a free research-management tool for desktop and Web, designed for managing and sharing research papers, discovering research data, and collaborating online. It combines Mendeley Desktop, a PDF and reference management application, with Mendeley Web, an online social network for researchers.

Highlights:

Access your library, everywhere - add papers directly from your browser with a few clicks or import any documents from your desktop. Access your library from anywhere. Windows, Mac, Linux and all browsers
Easy referencing - generate references, citations and bibliographies in a whole range of journal styles with just a few clicks
Build your Research network - 30 million references and over 6 million researchers to discover. Our personalised recommendations makes staying up to date easy
Career development and funding - 172,785 science and technology jobs to advance your career. Grant information from over 2,000 organizations to launch your research project

What's new in Mendeley Desktop

Version 1.19.5:

Complete list of changes can be found here

Mendeley Desktop Screenshots

18 Mendeley Desktop Reviews

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Possibly the best of the breed. Negative points: Not native Mac OS X (read, not Cocoa). Built with Qt, many controls are non-Mac like, and definitely are not polished. That said, it is not yet even version 1. Positive points: Everything else. The program does a pretty decent job of sucking in PDFs and recognizing their meta-data. If no meta-data, it tries to recognize main components of a paper -- the title, author(s), year, etc. Has a built in PDF reader and annotator with highlights and notes. Can format citations many different ways (styles), has plug-ins for OpenOffice/NeoOffice. Where it really shines is that it also has a web version which syncs with the desktop. The web presence is fully social-networks buzzword compliant with friends, colleagues, networks, RSS, stats, etc.

Like (4)

Version 0.9.4

Mendeley is [1] a reference manager for MS Word, OpenOffice and LibreOffice and [2] an academic social network. After downloading the desktop application, you MUST create a (free) online account before you can start using the application. Although it's not strictly required, you can upload your references and grant other users access to them. This is of course fine if you want to collaborate with others. You can also create research groups for your particular research field. Although you don't upload anything yourself, you can still search and download references from the mutual online pool.

I searched for a famous book which was first published in 1943 and which has been reprinted innumerable times since then. To my surprise the book itself wasn't there, but instead I found scholarly journal articles ABOUT the book.

Citation plugins for MS Word, OpenOffice (?) and LibreOffice need to be installed/activated extra. If you use other and better word processors such as Nisus Writer Pro, Mellel or Scrivener, you're completely out of luck: there seems to be no easy way to enter citations and automatically create bibliographies in anything else than in Microsoft Word and LibreOffice. You can do it manually by copy and paste, of course, but who would want to do that? Zotero doesn't have this glaring omission. For this reason I give Mendeley only 1 star. For citations and bibliographies I recommend Bookends. It's extremely versatile and has the best support I have ever experienced by any software company.

Like (4)

Version 1.17.13

Eric•Woehler

07 December 2016

Started using this to organise my PDF collection (12+GB) of scientific papers etc then gave up when realised Mendeley's free library and associated services was limited to 1 GB and anything beyond that required subscription. So still looking for alternative. Mendeley great for small PDF libraries, and probably ok for larger libraries of PDFs, but not for me

Like (2)

Version 1.17.6

3 answer(s)

xcoxco

14 February 2017

Once support from Sente waned, I converted to Bookends. I track about 12,000 references and 7,000 pdfs, and sync across platforms. The developer's support is excellent. Though not perfect, Bookends is a solid alternative.

Like (3)

cig0

14 September 2017

Check out DEVONThink and Calibre.

Like (1)

mugsuk

14 December 2017

Bibdesk is one of my all-time favourite apps

Neil-M

30 September 2014

I've given up on the Mendeley apps. I'm using Papership for Mendeley now. It's giving access to both my Mendeley and Zotero libraries. There are apps for both Mac and iOS - supports annotation (additional purchase inside iOS version). Strangely Papership is not listed on MU. http://www.papershipapp.com

Like (1)

Version 1.11

2 answer(s)

SMcCandlish

07 December 2015

Why? Having a preference for one app over another doesn't really tell us much about either.

Like (1)

Neil-M

07 December 2015

@Smccandlish, the comment was almost 15 months ago...
You are simply adding a comment onto my comment, without adding any more information yourself.So, I'm left wondering why bother commenting on a 15 month old comment (NOT review).

If you require a response from, at that point in time, Sept, 2014 - neither Mendeley or Zotero were fulfilling my needs across Mac, iPad and iPhone.

In addition, I wanted to use my research library when publishing with wordpress, so the state of access to Mendeley and Zotero via plugins was (still is) important.

At that point in time, Paperships had a great iOS client and allowed accessing both libraries. The syncing of annotation features in iOS Paperships was (15 months ago) more reliable on my setup.

15 months later, the Mac Desktop version of Papership has not really developed - Both desktop version of Mendeley & Zotero have developed, with a least a few of the niggles, that I encountered in my workflow being fixed.

I have tried and unfortunately still have to use a number services to catalogue my research references. Zotero, Mendeley, RefME, Bookends, Sente, etc.

Portability and syncing between the services is therefore pretty crucial. The Bookends iOS app, "Bookends on Tap" did not cut it for me 15 months ago. It's improved, but still no 'cloud solution'.

Re: Papership - the point has not changed in 15 months, same comment "access to both my Mendeley and Zotero libraries".

https://www.maxmasnick.com/2015/02/28/reference-managers/ - has a much more thorough review of the +/- aspects of reference managers.

werkplekbeheer

02 May 2013

Mendeley Desktop 1.8.4 is available at the developers' site

Version 1.8

1 answer(s)

Jess-MacUpdate

02 May 2013

Thanks, werkplekbeheer! The listing has been updated thanks to you. :-)

Hugely disappointed with Mendeley. With Connotea closing down, I switched to citeulike and Mendeley to keep my discovered scientific articles up-to-date. Mendeley used to sync with citeulike, but it has changed its API and this no longer works. Its bookmarklet is much weaker than citeulike's, with no clear tagging autofill and a worse workflow. The desktop app doesn't allow me to fill in missing information by doing a DOI search, but forces me to manually add info unless its first PDF scan was OK. Database management is non-existent. I want to standardise on particular name and Journal formats, but no way to edit the database robustly. And you need very precarious hacks to get annotated Journal names. Mendeley takes quite a long time to sync and often hangs. But if Mendeley had a solid iPad version, its myriad flaws could be overlooked, but the mobile version of Mendeley is so utterly unstable, underpowered and slow + buggy it is unusable. Such a shame, Mendeley keeps getting lots of publicity, but it is so flawed and compromised I can't use it for its intended purpose.

Like (4)

Version 1.8

1 answer(s)

Lumac52

02 March 2014

FYI Colwiz appears to have CiteULike import.

This is a good, desktop citation management tool for PDFs. As noted, it is somewhat non-Mac compliant in behavior, as might be expected of cross-platform apps. It has many features in its own right, especially the cloud-based storage of citations for collaborative or on-the-go workflow. It is rather easy to use, if somewhat encumbered by its lack of Mac-centric options for keyboard shortcuts and one-click operations. Unfortunately, WRT on-the-go workflow, the current iPad version (1.3.4) sucks. It is basically just a glorified and buggy viewer for the PDF Mendeley files. This downfall makes on-the-go management of PDF citations via Mendeley practically worthless. If you definitely need this functionality as well, look elsewhere for the time being.

Like (2)

Version 1.8

Mendeley Desktop

Overview

Highlights:

What's new in Mendeley Desktop

Mendeley Desktop Screenshots

18 Mendeley Desktop Reviews

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