Comments on: Organizing a PDF library: Mendeley for information extraction, Zotero for open source goodness

By: NellyG

NellyG — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 22:09:19 +0000

Hi,
Thanks for the great review!
I am about to start to Zotero to manage my huge pdf collection (thousands). I prefer Mendeley ‘s interface but unfortunately, its capacity is limited to 500Mo so I chose Zotero instead.
I was wondering how to make the best of zotero and especially how you organise your pdfs: do you use categories? by project/ topic? tags alone? or combining tags and folders?
I want to take the right decision now and not having to rechange the whole thing in 6 months so I would really appreciate some advice.

Thanks!

By: Jodi Schneider

Jodi Schneider — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 01:34:30 +0000

Brook,

Had to think about this. I’d stick with Zotero for now. You can push files from Zotero to Mendeley easily right now–but not vice versa yet.

By: Brook

Brook — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 05:27:37 +0000

So I’m a 1st year Ph.D. student in O&M (orgs and management – part business, part sociology), and I am debating which platform to use to organize the next 5-10 years worth of research… any thoughts on which would be a better option for those of us starting basically from square one?

By: js

js — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 14:57:26 +0000

PS. I’m a Johnnie too. SF02!

By: js

js — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 14:48:51 +0000

Hi Jodi,

I’ve been experimenting with Zotero & Mendeley for a while now, both as a LIS student and professionally as a research assistant on a big old meta analysis project. Like you, I decided that Mendeley would be best put to use to organize the hundreds and potentially ultimately thousands of PDFs we are using in our study. So far, so good, though I’m also looking forward to the proposed collaboration between Mendeley & Zotero (more for my personal studies than at work).

My workflow is set up so that Mendeley watches a folder that our research associates save PDFs to, and I go in on a weekly basis and check the metadata for review (the new lookup features for questionable metadata are great in the newest release, especially if you’re lucky enough to be looking for articles that tend to be in PubMed, as I am. Google still leaves something to be desired.) and then tag and sort the PDFs in the “unsorted” um…pile in Mendeley into groups. I imagine that if you’re pulling PDFs through Zotero, you could set up Mendeley to watch the folder that Zotero saves to, so that you don’t have to do too much moving of PDFs.

Thanks for doing this side-by-side comparison. I love bibliographic tool geekouts.

-Jess

By: Jodi Schneider

Jodi Schneider — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 13:37:00 +0000

Thanks, Jan! I’ve shared the problem files with support@mendeley.com.
I know you’ve pushed out several Mendeley updates since I completed this test on July 2nd.

By: Jan

Jan — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 09:33:15 +0000

Hi Jodi,

thanks for this detailed test and report, and sorry if Mendeley doesn’t get everything right, but we are trying hard to further improve, as you can guess.

Would you mind sending the research papers/files where the relevant metadata has been extracted incorrectly to support@mendeley.com so that we can have a look at them?

BTW, as and additional comment, you can also use Mendeley to store and archive additional file types (e.g. HTML, DOC – simply attach them to the metadata set), and Mendeley’s bookmarklet will soon be able to grab whole web pages as well, but we really hope that the connection to Zotero will improve the user experience even more.

Let me know if you have any further questions – you can also have a look at our feedback forum (http://feedback.mendeley.com) to see upcoming features and improvements.

Thanks again
Jan
(jan.reichelt@mendeley.com)