Thing 14: Zotero / Mendeley / citeulike

I've chosen to look at Mendeley. It was easy to download on to my desktop at home (yet, to do battle with the Administrator Password at work). I like the fact that you can save your reference details direct from the pdf file and then make notes on the pdf document. This all seems much easier than the RefWorks tool we have at work. I don't mind the act of referencing but I'm not keen on teaching students how to use referencing software. It always seems too complicated for most of them to comprehend and I'm not convinced that I know enough about it to use it properly. I never show the students RefWorks in their first year. We don't hide it from them we just don't run courses on it. I and many of the academic staff think they need to learn why it's important to reference and how to reference the basic stuff before moving on to referencing software which will just do it all for them. Otherwise how do they know what RefWorks is doing or whether it has produced a bibliography in the correct format. How would they spot mistakes made by the software?

Mendeley looks like it might be more useful to students/academic staff who have a big stash of pdfs that they store on their computer. I can see it being good for all those lecturers who publish a lot of papers and want to keep their references and pdf documents in the one place that they can access from home and work.  It would be better if Mendeley were web-based like RefWorks so that you didn't have to download it and could access it from wherever you could connect to the internet. All in all a good tool but I'll be sticking to RefWorks as I have to use this at work.