Endnote Web

A couple of days ago I blogged about Mendeley but mentioned Endnote. A couple of people asked me about this so I thought I'd blog about Endnote too.

Endnote is a bibliographic software. What this means is that as you go hunting for papers on topics you can store the ones you find in one place and then, when you're ready to put the references into your essay or case report you can just insert the entire reference without having to type it into the document yourself. Believe me - this makes writing stuff a lot quicker.

Endnote comes in two formats - desktop and web version (http://www.endnote.com/enwebinfo.asp).

Anybody with a QMUL login can get access to Endnote Web for free (http://www.library.qmul.ac.uk/endnote/obtain). This allows you to access all your references from any computer wired up to the net.

You can also choose to share some or all of your references with other people - perhaps those you are collaborating with when writing something up.

If you want the desktop version you will need to buy this. Students and staff can get this at a reduced price (see link above for where to get it). Otherwise buy online: http://www.endnote.com

Mendeley-ahoooooo

Anybody else finding that they are acquiring a multitude of pdf files that they then lose on their hard drive?

This problem has plagued me. I have tried to get round it by using Endnote and attaching the pdfs to my references but then I have pdfs that aren't journal articles and I have to remember which Endnote library I put the pdf in.

Last week I was introduced to Mendeley (http://www.mendeley.com/) and suddenly the future looks a little less pdf-messy.

This software is basically a place to dump our pdfs. You can download a desktop version that synchronises with the web version. This means you can also access your pdfs wherever you are - even on your smartphone. Not only that, if you are working in a small group and want to share your pdfs between you, you can easily do that too.

There are no folders in Mendeley. Instead you need to tag your pdfs so you can find them easily, though you can also order them by the keywords that were included in the original article by the author. All in all, I'm liking this. The only proviso is that there is a limit to the free option online, though at 500MB I reckon it'll be a while before that gets hit.