The market for software able to sort through your academic papers and manage your references is crowded. The latest list puts the number of software packages at over 20, each offering just something slightly different. So now enter Mendeley, the brainchild of one of its founders, Jan Reichelt, a graduate of the University of Bath and a current PhD student at the University of Cologne.
He told me that the idea for Mendeley really started to form during his PhD, he was tired of having hundreds of papers in random folders on his computer and disliked the layout and format of EndNote, the then biggest software for reference management. He started to develop along with the fellow founders of Mendeley, software that was able to scan the PDFs and put this information along with the paper itself into a simple piece of software. What started as a side project developed quickly into one of the fastest growing pieces of software in the market. Investors include Stefan Glanzer, the former chairman of last.fm, Alejandro Zubillaga, former head of Digital at the Warner Music Group and even prominent academics such as Prof. Ralph Etienne-Cummings at The John Hopkins University. Mendeley has a great deal of momentum behind it, Stanford and Harvard Universities are among its most popular user bases.
Mendeley has bold plans, it wants to see its sleek and modern looking interface being the place to search, sort and even buy academics papers. One of their future projects is to interface Mendeley with iTunes, so users can buy academics journals through their interface and even link into Facebook to enable users to have feeds, which inform them when their favourite authors or friends upload and use Mendeley. The issue of price is an important one, while Endnote charges for its services, there are many packages such as Zotero, which do not. The price is a big factor in the choice of software for academics, so I asked Jan whether users should be worried about Mendeley charging for its products. “What is free now, will always be free” he replied, however there will also be a premium service designed for heavy users who require more storage space. For the majority of users however the standard service will suffice. Mendeley’s mentality is to always keep the end user in mind. In the course of the interview, Jan was interested in my experience of the software, it was refreshing see that someone so senior in the company still really understood the inner-workings of the program and was generally interested in my experience of using the software, its clear that Mendeley is his passion.
Mendeley’s success will however rely more on word of mouth and appealing to the academic mindset. Packages such as Zotero and Mendeley largely do the same thing, but what makes them successful are the small things such as the interface, the customer support, the website and its integration into popular software and operating systems. From my experience of using it for a week I can definitely see it catching on and one year from now, Mendeley may well be the new buzzword on campus.
Try it out at www.mendeley.com
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