Mendeley Desktop

I note a couple of strange things here. Presently, this is at the top: "Mendeley Desktop - 1.19.5 - 03 May 2019". But what downloads both here and at the Developer website linked to above is actually Version 1.19.4 of 08 April, 2019. And just as strange: The "Complete list of changes can be found here" linked to above tells us that Mendeley Desktop v1.19.6 (no date indicated) is the latest Stable Release. I find it hard to trust a developer with such a mess at their website.

Mendeley is [1] a reference manager for MS Word, OpenOffice and LibreOffice and [2] an academic social network. After downloading the desktop application, you MUST create a (free) online account before you can start using the application. Although it's not strictly required, you can upload your references and grant other users access to them. This is of course fine if you want to collaborate with others. You can also create research groups for your particular research field. Although you don't upload anything yourself, you can still search and download references from the mutual online pool.

I searched for a famous book which was first published in 1943 and which has been reprinted innumerable times since then. To my surprise the book itself wasn't there, but instead I found scholarly journal articles ABOUT the book.

Citation plugins for MS Word, OpenOffice (?) and LibreOffice need to be installed/activated extra. If you use other and better word processors such as Nisus Writer Pro, Mellel or Scrivener, you're completely out of luck: there seems to be no easy way to enter citations and automatically create bibliographies in anything else than in Microsoft Word and LibreOffice. You can do it manually by copy and paste, of course, but who would want to do that? Zotero doesn't have this glaring omission. For this reason I give Mendeley only 1 star. For citations and bibliographies I recommend Bookends. It's extremely versatile and has the best support I have ever experienced by any software company.

Started using this to organise my PDF collection (12+GB) of scientific papers etc then gave up when realised Mendeley's free library and associated services was limited to 1 GB and anything beyond that required subscription. So still looking for alternative. Mendeley great for small PDF libraries, and probably ok for larger libraries of PDFs, but not for me

There are 4 updates since v1.15.1: v1.15.2, v1.15.3, v1.16, v1.16.1.

There are 4 updates since v1.15.1: v1.15.2, v1.15.3, v1.16, v1.16.1.

There is a new release version 1.13.8 in their official website.

There is a new version (1.13.5) listed in their official site.

I've given up on the Mendeley apps. I'm using Papership for Mendeley now. It's giving access to both my Mendeley and Zotero libraries. There are apps for both Mac and iOS - supports annotation (additional purchase inside iOS version). Strangely Papership is not listed on MU. http://www.papershipapp.com

Mendeley Desktop 1.8.4 is available at the developers' site

Hugely disappointed with Mendeley. With Connotea closing down, I switched to citeulike and Mendeley to keep my discovered scientific articles up-to-date. Mendeley used to sync with citeulike, but it has changed its API and this no longer works. Its bookmarklet is much weaker than citeulike's, with no clear tagging autofill and a worse workflow. The desktop app doesn't allow me to fill in missing information by doing a DOI search, but forces me to manually add info unless its first PDF scan was OK. Database management is non-existent. I want to standardise on particular name and Journal formats, but no way to edit the database robustly. And you need very precarious hacks to get annotated Journal names. Mendeley takes quite a long time to sync and often hangs. But if Mendeley had a solid iPad version, its myriad flaws could be overlooked, but the mobile version of Mendeley is so utterly unstable, underpowered and slow + buggy it is unusable. Such a shame, Mendeley keeps getting lots of publicity, but it is so flawed and compromised I can't use it for its intended purpose.

This is a good, desktop citation management tool for PDFs. As noted, it is somewhat non-Mac compliant in behavior, as might be expected of cross-platform apps. It has many features in its own right, especially the cloud-based storage of citations for collaborative or on-the-go workflow. It is rather easy to use, if somewhat encumbered by its lack of Mac-centric options for keyboard shortcuts and one-click operations. Unfortunately, WRT on-the-go workflow, the current iPad version (1.3.4) sucks. It is basically just a glorified and buggy viewer for the PDF Mendeley files. This downfall makes on-the-go management of PDF citations via Mendeley practically worthless. If you definitely need this functionality as well, look elsewhere for the time being.

Version 1.8 is available directly from the official web site.

New Version is 1.5.1. Get it from there http://www.mendeley.com/download-mendeley-desktop/?_section=footer

The current version is 1.0.1 get it from Mendeley website

How well does Mendeley work with either Pages or Mellel, as compared with MS-Word? We abandoned Word for serious writing long ago.

This is a very nice Papers clone. It is freeware. If you want some higher end features using the Mendeley server you need to pay for them (this is only fair). MD is available for Mac, Linux, Windows - great for collaboration! Some glitches are: no full screen PDF modus. Opening PDFs only by double clicking, no keybord command. Display not using Apple's OSX-built-in technology but an inferior PDF display looking only slightly better than the terrible Adobe Reader PDF display. Mendeley Desktop has organize options also for books and other documents, it is not limited to magazines/papers like Papers. I would recommend MD to all users who don't want to pay for Papers and can live with the mediocre PDF display. In many parts Mendeley is much more flexible than Papers. Try it out!

It looks good, but I wish it could work with Pages documents.

An excellent application, though with a few bugs in synching with the web. Instructions are not too clear, and they assume the user will have knowledge about proxys. But developer is responsive and answers questions. Should only improve. It's already led to me developing contacts with overseas researchers and receiving some good advice.

Possibly the best of the breed. Negative points: Not native Mac OS X (read, not Cocoa). Built with Qt, many controls are non-Mac like, and definitely are not polished. That said, it is not yet even version 1. Positive points: Everything else. The program does a pretty decent job of sucking in PDFs and recognizing their meta-data. If no meta-data, it tries to recognize main components of a paper -- the title, author(s), year, etc. Has a built in PDF reader and annotator with highlights and notes. Can format citations many different ways (styles), has plug-ins for OpenOffice/NeoOffice. Where it really shines is that it also has a web version which syncs with the desktop. The web presence is fully social-networks buzzword compliant with friends, colleagues, networks, RSS, stats, etc.