cultural bytes - Latest Comments in Cloud Computing for Researchers - Mendeley Your Life!

Re: Cloud Computing for Researchers - Mendeley Your Life!

Delu — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 15:32:06 -0000

This is the best explanation on how Mendley works. I have been struggling to understand the communication between the Rename and the Watch features for a long time.
I have to go and delete the downloaded file.
You made it clear.
Thank you so much.

Re: Cloud Computing for Researchers - Mendeley Your Life!

how to cite a book — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 06:00:05 -0000

Excellent post guys..................................

Re: Cloud Computing for Researchers - Mendeley Your Life!

triciawang — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 09:56:23 -0000

hey dave glad that Zotero is working for you - you're right $$ doesn't make it better -

The problem isn't that it's F/OSS - the problem were the features sets, customer service, and everything else listed in my blogpost. I have been a huge supporter of F/OSS for a long time since my first slackware install but zotero just didn't work for me. I do hear, however, that zotero is releasing it's stand alone desktop program so that will be interesting!
ciao!
tricia

Re: Cloud Computing for Researchers - Mendeley Your Life!

dave — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 07:01:13 -0000

Zotero is much much more flexible interms of use. Why have an extra layer (another stand alone program) on top of all the programs you use already? This is where Zotero shines because 90% of all a researchers work in done in browser so it makes sense to have Zotero there and not as a stand alone tool.

Both tools are the same functionality but Zotero just wins out for me because of the way its integrated and works within my ecosystem( easy saving and cataloguing of different sources of information, screen shots with easy annotation tools etc) and putting down an app because its open source is just plain stupid. $$ doesn't necessarily means a better product (Mendeley).

Re: Cloud Computing for Researchers - Mendeley Your Life!

triciawang — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 12:46:10 -0000

hey jimme thanks for letting me know about qiqqa! I would def test this out but it's not available for macs.
I agree with you that Mendeley doesn't yet have the PDF support that I would like - I still can't unhighlight a text with MEndeley's highlight tool.
But their other features are so far the best I've seen.

Well let me know when you get a mac version up and running with bibliographic support!

Re: Cloud Computing for Researchers - Mendeley Your Life!

Jimme Jardine — Mon, 17 May 2010 19:54:58 -0000

Hi Tricia,

This is a great blog post - Mendeley must love you! How long did it take to make all those screenshots :-)

I have been coming at the research management problem from a different perspective. I decided to build Qiqqa (pronounced "Quicker") at the same time as working towards my PhD.

Although I did try using existing applications like Zotero and Mendeley, to locate my papers, I found them all quite lacking in the ability to mark the interesting parts of my papers (text, formulae and diagrams) so that I can quickly review them every few months, and especially when it comes time to writing up my thesis! GoogleScholar is still my method of choice for locating documents, so I made it easy to query Google Scholar while reading a PDF. Of course, using it all day, I have added in tons of little nifty features that save me loads of time (e.g. right-click text in PDF and lookup word in dictionary.com).

Also, I found the text searching and exporting support from most of the other tools to be quite unreliable for scanned PDFs, so I built in OCR to tackle that.

At the moment I don't support bibliography management - although that is coming fast (I have only been working on Qiqqa since the beginning of this year and I don't want to add yet-another-half-baked-references-manager to the world). But first I am putting in the finishing touches on synchronizing and backing up onto the Amazon S3 cloud so that I can work from the lab and from home.

I am hoping that others will find Qiqqa useful, and will enjoy using it as much as I have enjoyed writing it. I hope to get a lot of feedback from other students and researchers to learn how they are approaching their PhDs or research, and where they are hitting bottlenecks.

If you have a moment, I'd really appreciate your feedback, since you've surveyed Mendeley so deeply. It's available at http://www.qiqqa.com.

Thanks,
Jimme (jimme@qiqqa.com)

Re: Cloud Computing for Researchers - Mendeley Your Life!

alexandra — Fri, 01 May 2009 16:37:58 -0000

thanks for the info Tricia... this looks like a life saver--i swear if it wasn't for you I'd still be in the land of paper and pencils.