Thing 14

Zotero/Mendeley/CiteULike

I've been playing about with this thing for the past couple of weeks, and have finally found the time (whilst manning the issue desk!) to write up my thoughts. This is something that I got excited about, I remember how much time I spent collating my references for my Masters project last summer, and how I wished there was an easier way to do it. Doing everything 'by hand' does allow errors to sneak in, and I have spent a great deal of my time over the last few years proof reading bibliographies for friends. It's amazing how much of a muddle you can get yourself in, for something that seems that it should be relatively simple.

I decided to give it a go with Mendeley (I liked the name :-)) and followed the instructions to download it onto my laptop, giving me a nice little shortcut on my desktop. I still had a selection of papers from my undergraduate studies on my laptop, so I set to work asking Mendeley to inport them. I was pleasantly surprised how many of the papers it could automatically recognise the details of, there only being a few from the more obscure journals that it got a bit muddled with (or gave up all together). I then got a little stuck, and this is something I need to work on, but I could figure out how to get Mendeley to create a bibliography list. Am I being dense? I think I will find it easier to play around with this software once I am studying again in September, and find that I actually need to use it!