This post was written by Brandy King, Chair of the Social Sciences Division and owner of Knowledge Linking

Have you tried Mendeley yet?  It’s combination bibliographic database and social network.  You create citation libraries and can share them with colleagues. I have heard about Mendeley for over a year, and signed up for an account months ago, but just today did I finally actually USE it.

What prompted me to take the jump? I was trying to export references from PubMed and import them into EndNote (bibliographic software to which I have been a devotee since high school).  In the process I was losing the URL of the PubMed record. A colleague of mine told me that when you import references from PubMed to Mendeley, it captures the URL of the record AND downloads the full-text automatically if it’s available for free.  I was sold!

Anyway, one of the cool things I discovered is that anyone can start a public group to share libraries. Those groups are organized into subject areas and you can see what papers are popular within those subject areas.  Here’s the page for Social Science groups — click around a bit!

Here’s a great video intro on how to import citations into Mendeley: