Webinar - Mendeley for Engineers (2011-08-25)

Mendeley is positioned as an all-in-one reference manager that keeps researchers’ libraries synchronized across desktop, web, and mobile—then layers organization, full-text search, collaboration, and analytics on top. The core pitch is practical: import papers quickly, extract metadata automatically, search across the full text of PDFs, and write with citations that update your bibliography as you draft. That combination matters because it reduces the two biggest time sinks in research workflows—building a clean bibliography and finding relevant material once a library grows into the hundreds or thousands of documents.

The webinar breaks down how papers enter a Mendeley library. The fastest path is drag-and-drop: drop a PDF or folder into the desktop app and Mendeley attempts to extract metadata such as title, abstract, authors, publisher, and page numbers. When automatic extraction fails—often with unusual journal formats or scanned PDFs—Mendeley flags the record as needing review and can fill missing fields by searching online using identifiers like DOI, PubMed ID, or arXiv ID. If no identifier is available, it can still search by title (including via Google Scholar) to complete the record. For ongoing intake, a “watch folder” feature monitors designated folders and automatically imports new PDFs whenever Mendeley opens (or stays open), extracting metadata and updating the library without repeated manual steps.

Once papers are in, Mendeley’s desktop interface organizes them through folders, subfolders, favorites, recently added items, and a “needs review” bucket for incomplete metadata. A key productivity feature is search ranking: queries can search across the library or within a selected folder, and when a PDF is opened, search becomes context-specific—limited to that document’s full text with navigation through occurrences. The built-in PDF viewer supports highlighting and notes, including post-it style annotations and document-wide notes. Those annotations can be shared in group settings, where multiple people can work on the same PDF and each contributor’s highlights appear in distinct colors.

Collaboration comes in two main forms: public groups and private groups. Public groups focus on sharing references (not necessarily PDFs), with options ranging from open participation to invite-only moderation. Private groups enable sharing full-text PDFs and annotations, plus a group dashboard that supports ongoing discussion through comments and activity feeds. Beyond group work, Mendeley’s “discovery” layer aggregates metadata from users’ libraries into a searchable research catalog, enabling cross-disciplinary search and surfacing readership statistics, related papers, and lightweight previews. When available through a university subscription, Mendeley can use an open URL resolver to help users reach full text in one click.

For writing, Mendeley integrates with word processors via a citation plugin for Microsoft Office on Windows and Mac (and supports OpenOffice/LibreOffice). Researchers can insert citations, generate bibliographies, and choose from many citation styles (with a large library of styles available to install). For LaTeX workflows, Mendeley can export BibTeX-compatible files and generate synchronized text files per collection.

Finally, the webinar highlights extensibility through an open API that exposes the research catalog and related information. Developers can build tools, wrappers, or even new applications on top of Mendeley’s aggregated data. The session also points to community feedback channels and a competition (Binary Battle) encouraging API-based projects, with prizes and judging by major industry names.