If you work in scientific research then you’ll know what a challenge it can be to organize your work, connect with others, and keep up with cutting edge innovations. 

That’s where Mendeley comes in.

Its free reference management tool is a type of academic social network where researchers can manage, discover and share new content with scientists all over the world. In the spirit of social media you can even clock-up “views,” gaining an instant idea of the impact of your research.

Mendeley is simple to pick up and use and there are several training courses to take you through the basics – here’s one.

Mendeley and Research4Life have been working together since 2014 - more about that here. A public-private partnership, R4L provides free and low-cost access to peer reviewed resources. One of its main aims is to boost access to information in places where it is often scarce and Mendeley, with its thousands of users and advisors in R4L countries, is making a big difference.

Elsevier acquired Mendeley last year. It’s an R4L founder and has provided over a quarter of the 40,000 publications on it through Scopus and Science Direct: Mendeley’s research tool make these even easier to get at and use.

Speaking at the start of the collaboration in 2014, Jan Reichelt, Co-founder and President of Mendeley said:

“So far researchers on the program [Research4Life] have been using patchy solutions involving various workflow and citation management tools, but these are often expensive, and if you’re trying to collaborate on a joint project with a researcher who does not have the same tool, that can be really problematic”.

“So we’re hoping that Mendeley, with its vast community of over 3 million researchers worldwide, will help to really facilitate and accelerate the pace of discovery for Research4Life Scientists.”

Because new users tend to be hugely enthusiastic about Mendeley, we’d be interested to hear your comments about it, below.