Thing 14 - Zotero/Mendeley/citeulike

For this 'Thing' we are looking at tools that would have no doubt been very useful when I was studying, but for whatever reason (not entirely sure what that reason was!) I chose not to engage with them.

Instead I chose to type a list of all the references I wanted to consult in a Word document, then bit by bit I worked my way through it, added new ones when they cropped up and making notes next to them once they’d been consulted.  Once I’d decided to use a reference in my dissertation I moved it across into a new Word document, were it was slotted in alphabetically to the list that later became my bibliography.

This now, with the benefit of hindsight, seems insane, and I truly have no real explanation as to why I chose to do it this way, particularly as my dissertation was only 1 & ½ years ago, and there were loads of very good referencing tools to chose from, all well established.

So although I’m not doing any research at the moment, I still was interested to check out what I’d been missing, particularly as they might be useful to recommend to our library users.

I only had time to play about with one of the tools, as I’m falling a little behind on the things, so I picked Mendeley.  This was mainly because, ages ago one of the curators enquired about using it, so the name stuck in my mind.

Image from http://www.mendeley.com/

I wasn’t able to download it to my work PC, so I used my laptop instead.  At first glance it looks very straightforward, and although I've only had a little play about with it so far, it does seem pretty user-friendly.