I just re-installed Mendeley after moving from Fedora to Kubuntu and in the process came across a few other posts / sites discussing the problem of managing large numbers of research articles. Here’s a few of the more interesting ones I came across.
- Defrosting the digital library: bibliographic tools for the next generation web
- How to get scientists to adopt web 2.0 technologies
- CiteULike – managing and discovering scholarly references
- Zotero word processor integration
- The OpenOffice Bibliographic project
The more time I spend with Mendeley, the more impressed I am. However, I’m a bit concerned that when importing my library this time, I’m short about 100 articles and have no way of knowing which ones didn’t make it.
Looking forward to trying the 0.6.5 release of Mendeley…
Comments
4 responses to “Managing digital libraries”
@Mr. Gunn
Hi Mr. Gunn. Thanks for your comment. Please see my reply to Brandon regarding that import issue. My apologies for wasting your time.
I’ve been playing with the generic 0.6.5 version but am still waiting for the Ubuntu version to be available on the download page. Looking forward to 0.7. Thanks for a great piece of software.
@Brandon
Hi Brandon. Thanks for the advice. However, I figured out what the problem was soon after that post. I’d saved some HTML files that also had the associated images, scripts, etc. included in the parent folder, which explains the “missing” files that Mendeley (rightly) didn’t import.
Sorry to mess you around.
Hey Michael. One thing to check is that there aren’t duplicate documents, since Mendeley will recognize that the citation already exists and not reimport it. Oh, and make sure the pdfs aren’t corrupted (you can open them in a program and view them). A tabbed pdf viewer like Foxit comes in handy for this.
Worst case scenario – make a quick backup of the folder with your papers, tell Mendeley to organize your papers in a new folder, and see what doesn’t transfer (I forget offhand if Mendeley will copy the pdfs or actually move them. If it move them, this works, if not, you can sort the folder by something like file size to compare the files by hand.)
I agree that there should be some feedback that tells you how many dupes or unrecognized files there were in a batch. I think maybe the logistics of being able to import more files as others are being processed makes this a programming hassle, but I’ll check into ways to do this.
Hope this helps in the meantime. Cheers!
Hi Michael! Thanks for using Mendeley, and I’m glad you’re finding it useful. Let us know how you get on with the new version, and keep a look out for 0.7, due early June.
I’ll pass your import issue on to our developers, and if you have more feedback, you can leave a note on our uservoice here: http://feedback.mendeley.com/pages/4941-mendeley-feedback