Bei Yu began working on a research project at the start of the fall semester.

Yu, an assistant professor in Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies, quickly realized she needed to find an easier way to collaborate with faculty assistants working with her on the project.

‘We needed to be able to share all the documents we were finding for the research,’ Yu said.

So Yu and her students tested three free online research tools: Zotero, CiteULike and Mendeley. After a few trials, they decided the Mendeley research management tool was the easiest, and best, tool to use for sharing academic documents.

Mendeley, which was founded in November 2007, and launched in August 2008, helps users organize, share and find research papers. There are currently 100,000 people using Mendeley who have uploaded more than 8.5 million documents to the research database, said co-founders Jan Reichelt and Victor Henning, in an e-mail. The site has seen a surge in users at SU recently, they said.

Mendeley is available as a desktop application and as a Web platform – one of its main benefits, said Pradnya Khadapkar, a master’s student in the School of Information Studies.

‘Mendeley syncs what is on my desktop to my web account,’ said Khadapkar, a faculty assistant working on Yu’s research project. ‘It saves a lot of time when you are dealing with large amounts of papers.’

Using Mendeley Desktop, users can import all of their documents on their computer. Mendeley is also compatible with EndNote Web XML and BibTeX, programs previously used to organize documents, into the user’s library, Richelt and Henning said.

The library has a bibliography manager that renames files so they are all organized in the same format, according to the Mendeley Web site.

‘I have 200 PDF files on my computer that I need to track by author and topics,’ said Kang Yu, a Ph. D. candidate in physics at SU. ‘I use Mendeley because I can easily keep track of my files and use them as references.’

Mendeley Web provides users with updates and statistics of the most popular authors, papers and journals in their academic discipline.

‘This function allows people to connect with each other based on the research papers they read and shared,’ Reichelt and Henning said.

Although Mendeley Desktop and Mendeley Web can be used independently from each other, they can also be used to share data between the two platforms allowing users to synchronize their papers on- and off-line, Reichelt and Henning said.

‘Mendeley is similar to Zotero in that it allows users to sync their computer-based citation database with a Web-based account,’ said Thomas Keays, an associate librarian at SU.

Reichelt and Henning gave three main reasons why Mendeley is changing the way scientific research is conducted:

Users collaborate internationally with researchers whose existence they might not have otherwise known about.

Users can recommend other people’s shared documents, and see how many people are reading their own.

Mendeley uses a ‘crowdsourcing’ model to accumulate data into its research database.

In early 2010, Mendeley plans on releasing version 1.0 of Mendeley Desktop along with a premium version that will provide users with more account space and other useful features, the co-founders said.

Mendeley’s goal for the future is to be a place where people can get content and contacts in research.

‘Our aim is to increase productivity, transparency and accessibility for everyone who has to deal with academic knowledge,’ Reichelt and Henning said.

hadrost@syr.edu

Published on December 6, 2009 at 12:00 pm