Mendeley Desktop1.19.5

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.

There are 4 updates since v1.15.1: v1.15.2, v1.15.3, v1.16, v1.16.1.

There are 4 updates since v1.15.1: v1.15.2, v1.15.3, v1.16, v1.16.1.

There is a new release version 1.13.8 in their official website.

There is a new version (1.13.5) listed in their official site.

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.