This post is about Microbiology of the Built Environment Mendeley group …
Social networking and bibliographies may not seem like they go together well. But actually, they do. In the last few years there has been a movement to “socialize” bibliographies and reference collections. There are many many many systems for doing this, some better than others. The good ones have embraced many of the features of social networking tools so that people can share references, search for papers, built networks, and more. Previously I wrote here about one option for this – CiteULike: Introducing citeulike group on microbiology of the built environment (w/ instructions) #microBEnet.
Well, after experimenting with many of the options out there in addition to CiteULike we have concluded that the Mendeley system is currently the best system for what we want to do here with microBEnet. So we have creating a “Mendeley Group” : Microbiology of the Built Environment. What do we think makes Mendeley better than CiteULike? Well, many things, perhaps too many to go into now. But the overall software systems for Mendeley just have many more useful features than CiteUlike and the social networking aspects are also better. For more about Mendeley it might be best to read some of the other stuff written about it including:
- Mendeley 1.0 released Today
- Share and Share Alike: Mendeley 1.0
- Mendeley: If you liked that research paper, try this one -…
- New online tool helps academics manage research | Daily…
- The Disruption of Scientific Publishing | Beyond The Beyond
But rather than blather on and on about what Mendeley might do. We recommend people just go out and try it. To get started go to the Mendeley home page and create an account (you can sign in with Facebook if you like). Then, it would be useful to edit your profile a tiny bit and then get going. One thing that is very useful to do is to upload PDFs of your own publications into Mendeley. This is best done with the Desktop version of Mendeley which you can download here. Then you can import reference collections if you want to (e.g., if you have an Endnote library).
But even without doing any of this you can begin to engage in the Mendeley social network by joining groups. And we recommend, of course, that you try out the Microbiology of the Built Environment group. This group is open to anyone to join and we (as well as some others) have added in total a few hundred publications to the papers collection for the group. One nice thing about these groups is you can keep up with what others are adding by either logging on to Mendeley and looking at the group newsfeed or by looking at / following one of the widgets one can make for the group – as in the one below:
Microbiology of the Built Environment is a group in Biological Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Materials Science on Mendeley.
Another thing you can do is check out the tags we have added to papers. We have been curating the papers by adding various tags that should help people find papers of interest. If you go to the “Papers” tab for the group you can see many of these tags (on the left) and if you select one of the tags you will get the papers that have that tag. For example, selecting “dust” gets you 47 papers that we have tagged with “dust”. Selecting rRNA gets you 36 papers.
There are many other features of Mendeley that I like and will write about this resource more in the future. But for now we are hoping that people at least take a look and if interested join and/or use the group.
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