Mendeley Works…
In this blog post, I am going to discuss the effectiveness of the citation management tool, Mendeley. Mendeley is a free service (fee for over 2GB of storage), which is largely known for its ability to organize a researcher’s sources. Mendeley has the capability to work across different operating systems, and both macs and PCs. In a description of Mendeley, I found that the tool was awesome for downloading many PDF articles. In using JSTOR, documents in the past, I always download them onto a PDF to make it easier to scroll through and read an article, rather than through flipping the pages on the JSTOR page itself, I downloaded a couple PDF documents to test Mendeley’s ability, and was very pleased with its effectiveness. I used an Edgar Allan Poe document below to review how easy it was to use. I was able to effectively highlight parts of the document and made notes, as seen below.
The document also has the ability to keep different tabs open which would be very useful in huge research projects requiring keeping track of many sources. The service also has the ability for you to build up your own personal “library” of various sources, both those for research, and those for pleasure. These libraries launch a list of “suggestions in which the website matches your library with other libraries that you may like. This feature is my favorite tool, because it could be very useful in finding different sources that others have found, which you might not have found on your own. I screenshotted my own use of this tool. Since I only have one document, the device struggles to generate many quality suggestions, but had I filled it with bunch of documents on the Vietnam war, this option could be very useful.
The main flaw with Mendeley has to do with teh general direction the way of the world is going. This resource would mostly be used by students (millennials), around 18–33 years of age. As time goes on, these “college-aged students” will become more and more technologically advanced in using sources effectively on their own without the need for a tool like Mendeley. Despite the future of such citation management tools being perhaps in doubt; right now, I think the product is very effective, especially as a college student who writes frequent papers involving many sources. I could see other people in high levels of educations (with frequent papers) use this source, or perhaps someone who makes a living writing research papers, but for the casual paper-writer, this source is unnecessary.
