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).