I am working on a piece of work with my supervisor. She has asked me to get her references ready for a journal publication. At the moment, she does it all by hand.

I suggested using endnote - as that is what I use. But the uni only supports refworks and after a quick look it seems weird and not as good as endnote.

But I need a programme we can both use and as she doesn't have endnote, I can't really use it.

It has to be a VERY simple programme (think your great great grandad could use it) but also be able to have all the journal formats in, like endnote does as output styles e.g. select output style 'journal of postgraduate forum'

any ideas?

I use Mendeley and after a little while getting used to it I find it really easy, I have never had a problem with how it formats my references either, like it rarely 'makes mistakes', the only thing you have to add afterwards is the page number if quoting something. Its free as well which is always good! Only thing is I haven't worked out how to go back and forth from the Mendeley on my desktop and the online version so I can only use it at home which is a bit annoying, but I work mainly from home so it's not too much of an issue. You can add notes to text and highlight it etc and that can be useful. I've not used any of the others but went to a workshop about using EndNote - in my opinion Mendeley seems a bit more simple to use.

see I guess I'd have to have some sort of online thing, so we could both access the database and use it from different sites.

There is defintely a way of accessing your library online that is probably very simple to use - I just haven't worked out how to use it and I don't really need to. If you find out how - let me know!

How's your Lumie clock been working, are you still getting up naturally?

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Thanks Natassia, I'll play around with Mendeley tonight.

I think the lumie clock is great, we usually set the (old) alarm for 6am, but have found that we set it (the lumie) for 6.10 otherwise we were up too early. I've set the (old) alarm anyway just in case, but not had to use it yet - I'm up about 1 min before it (the old alarm) goes off, its quite bizarre!

Hubby's not sure about it, he thinks he wakes too early with it (he means about 5 mins before the alarm would go off)

Mendeley all the way sneaks. It's so simple, and Refowrks is so bad it should be banned and then burned. If you register online you can access your account that way, it will automatically sync accounts when you move from one computer to another, and cos it's free you can set it up on loads of computers. I love Mendeley :-x

Thanks Algae, do you know if it has output styles for journals? In endnote I can select it to come out as e.g. APA, Harvard style OR 'journal of xyz' style - does it do that? Not overly worried if it doesn't but would make my life easier.

I thought refworks looks awful - very difficult to work out where everything was on it and how to customise. Have no idea why our uni went with that rather than endnote, because it wasn't worth whatever saving they made!

Sure it does Sneaks :) its a normal reference software, able to do everything that endnote etc can do, although I don't think you can create your own style yet, But it has APA, Harvard etc. The difference is, that with MEndeley when you import an article, it automatically extracts all the information form it, so you just import from the website as normal, or you can drag and drop a paper into Mendeley and it will just pull out the bibliographic info. You need to check through it of course, there are occasional mistakes but it's really handy. And you can use Mendeley to serach for papers in your field and it will give you the current most read authors, papers related to current news stories etc.

ooh, ok sounds good. I've got to spend all day doing data analysis today, but will try and take a look this afternoon. :-)

Hi Sneaks! I hope everything is going well and that you and Mendeley are getting along just fine ;-) I just thought I'd pop in here and introduce myself. I work for Mendeley and I'd be happy to help you get started with it. Just shoot me a message or email.

Thanks for recommending Mendeley!

This should be fixed in the upcoming release.


This should normally just work. As long as you have registered your account on Mendeley Web and Mendeley Desktop syncs without error, you should be able to install it on any number of computers and have your library with you anywhere. If you are limited to web only at your school, you do miss out one some of the features in the Desktop client, but we should have some good news on that front fairly soon ;-) It can't hurt to have a word with your IT department about it either. If you make sure to let them know that they won't have to support Mendeley, as we do all our own support, that might help, too.