Journal article organization

[timuralp]

• Mendeley vs. Papers - Mendeley is free and cross-platform, so you can collaborate with anyone, regardless of OS. Also, while Papers organizes files very nicely, Papers doesn't have an add in for Word and OpenOffice.

I do wish it wasn't written in Java, however. Any thoughts of porting it to Python? Also, it's not free as in speech. Actually, why isn't open source?

[Dr. Gunn]

Quite a bit- it's a nice school, and the department is great.

I find it interesting coming from a large state school; here the graduate population is almost as large as the undergraduate one, so there is a lot more attention paid to graduate students in the overall school design, I think.

You should convince the Tulane library to offer Mendeley support/classes along with Refworks and Endnote- I think it would get a lot larger portion of the school using it.

They've done a story on us in the Tulanian, actually, but no classes so far. Maybe you could drop them a word on Mendeley's behalf? It would mean more coming from a current student than an alumni, I think.

[Dr. Gunn]

I do wish it wasn't written in Java, however. Any thoughts of porting it to Python? Also, it's not free as in speech. Actually, why isn't open source?

Here's the situation with Mendeley and Open Source. We started with a basic framework that included some proprietary code, just to get things up and running quickly, but we're now expanding to include open source modules for citation style editors and even third-party clients that work via the Mendeley API. Even if the source isn't entirely open, the data is open, and we have been able to build the largest open archive of academic material in the world. Surely we can get some credit for that?

[Gelato]

Hey all,

Did anyone fork out money and just get Adobe Acrobat? I've just downloaded Mendeley for my PC and also my Linux netbook (haven't gotten around to installing that yet), and while the highlighting and sticky notes are great (and I'm still in my first week so I haven't gotten to use the citation stuff yet),

there are still some things I can't do, ie, scribble a note, underline something, and highlight (or box) if it is a scanned pdf and not a words pdf. So I'm wondering if anyone uses Acrobat, and their thoughts on it. Or did you decide not to go with it because it was $$?

Thanks!

[Eigen]

I use acrobat- it's nice to be able to make, edit, and steal from PDFs really easily on the fly.

I got it free through our department, but I think I'd pay for it if I had to. It and Endnote are two things I can't do without.

[fuzzylogician]

Hey all,

Did anyone fork out money and just get Adobe Acrobat? I've just downloaded Mendeley for my PC and also my Linux netbook (haven't gotten around to installing that yet), and while the highlighting and sticky notes are great (and I'm still in my first week so I haven't gotten to use the citation stuff yet),

there are still some things I can't do, ie, scribble a note, underline something, and highlight (or box) if it is a scanned pdf and not a words pdf. So I'm wondering if anyone uses Acrobat, and their thoughts on it. Or did you decide not to go with it because it was $?

Thanks!

I use PDF-Xchange Viewer. It allows me to do all the things you mention, and it's free.

[rising_star]

there are still some things I can't do, ie, scribble a note, underline something, and highlight (or box) if it is a scanned pdf and not a words pdf. So I'm wondering if anyone uses Acrobat, and their thoughts on it. Or did you decide not to go with it because it was $?

I have an older version of Acrobat Pro (7.0) so hopefully this problem has been fixed. And the problem is that in scanned PDFs, you can't underline, highlight, etc. without going through text recognition on each page. If it can't render the text, then all you can do is put in pop-up notes.

I actually use the free version FoxIt Reader on my netbook, which lets me underline, highlight, and add notes. I've never tried to draw a box so I don't know how that works. It works fine for me.

[Postbib Yeshuist]

I third or fourth or fifth the Papers suggestion. It has its weaknesses, but it's great for organizing PDF's. Combine it with Dropbox and you can have one database shared across multiple computers...

[Genomic Repairman]

I run a hybrid of Endnote and Papers. All references are dumped into endnote but I keep my pdfs in Papers. This software also allows me to enter notes that I make the aritcles into the software and be stored in the program which also allows me to access my papers and notes from my iPod Touch.