by DAN CALLOWAY
Published 26 April 2010
WEAVERVILLE, NC – I recently discovered a great application for organizing and enhancing my research. It’s called the Mendeley Research Desktop V0.9.6.1.
Being a Ph.D. student who is in his third year of a doctoral program in IT Education, conducting research on the Internet through my university’s library or through Google Scholar is extremely important in gathering information for papers that I write. Since Capella University requires all scholarly papers to be written in APA format and all citations and bibliographic information to be in strict APA 6th Edition format as well, having an application that can assist in this area is extremely valuable.
Before discovering the Mendeley Research Desktop application, I used Zotero exclusively. Zotero is a plugin for the Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome Web browsers that also incorporates plugins for OpenOffice.org 3.1 (OOo3.1) and Microsoft Office Word 2003/2007 to support the insertion of citations and bibliographic information for writing research papers. Zotero was very good for organizing research collections and maintaining a database of my research. What I have discovered with the Mendeley Research Desktop, however, is that, unlike Zotero, it supports a community of researchers who collaborate on the research that they conduct, which is somewhat designed like Facebook.
Mendeley Research Desktop is a stand-alone application that runs in Windows, Mac, or Linux. I use this application in Ubuntu Linux and have found it to be extremely stable. There is a web-based extension of the Mendeley Research Desktop that supports sharing of research and collaboration on research that is underway. You must open an account at Mendeley’s Research website, but when you do, you will be able to build your profile, your area of research discipline interest, and much more. You’ll be connected to researchers worldwide who have written and shared their research through Mendeley that will assist you in conducting your own research. Mendeley integrates with Zotero and also offers plugins for OOo3.1 and Microsoft Word.
For more information on the Mendeley Research Desktop v0.9.6.1, please visit: Mendeley v0.9.6.1 released
