Organize academic publications with Mendeley Desktop

You have been downloading academic publications for the past couple of years like your life depended on it (well, your life actually depended on it). Now there are hundreds of them on your hard drive and you have difficulty in finding a paper when you need one. So you download it again. Before you know it, you have five copies of the same paper on your computer and you still can’t find it easily when you want because, well, you saved it with the default file name when you got it online and the default file name is something crazy like a string of numbers. Well, worry not. The guys over at Mendeley Research Networks have you covered. Mendeley Desktop is a desktop (duh) application for organizing your academic papers. It automatically extracts document details (name of journal, title, year of publication etc). So from that useless string of numbers that you called a filename, you now have something you can use. That way, it’s easy to spot multiple copies of the same paper. But that is not all you get. Mendeley Desktop features a lightning fast (alright, its fast) live search in your library so you can retrieve the paper you want quickly. Once you start using it, you will wonder how you ever went through those years without it. It runs on Windows, Mac and Linux so no child is left behind. Oh and one more thing; it has a really cool native PDF reader that works well.  You can still launch your paper with your external viewer though.

A screenshot of Mendely Desktop on my pc. If you double click any one of the papers, it will open the paper in the native reader as show below:

Mendeley Desktop is a must have for graduate students and post docs. To check it out, click here (Mendeley Desktop is still in it’s Beta, though it works really fine. It is FREE, but you will be required to register).

Keep everything in one place with Microsoft OneNote

We will be talking about software for making your experience in the lab more productive - or, failure of that, just a tad more interesting. You can, of course email me or send comments on your favorite toys that make your work easier. If you don't, I will just write what I want anyway, which was the original plan.

I decided to start off by talking about my favorite application of all time - Microsoft OneNote. OneNote is your one stop for all your notes, lists, ideas etc. For me, it is the one application (outside of system and security software) that is always running on my pc (which is conveniently tablet, so I can handwrite). OneNote allows you to open several notebooks, create different sections within a notebook and pages within a section (see below). This makes navigation very easy.

OneNote’s functionality is even great for surfing. While surfing the web, you can paste information of interest into your OneNote (rather than saving web pages, which is really old school). If you are trying the Office 2010 beta (you can find it here), you will notice that OneNote 2010 has a docking feature which allows you to dock it to the desktop, so that you can drag and drop stuff from other applications (mostly you will like to do this while surfing). If you get into the habit of throwing things into your OneNote portal (and then going through them end of week when you, hopefully, review your week), very few things will slip through your fingers. One of the things you will like about OneNote is that once you type (or paste) something in, it is there - no need to save.

If you haven't tried it yet, give OneNote a try. OneNote is part of the Microsoft office suite and is not free. The 2010 beta is free until October 2010.