Mendeley Desktop: Linux Version

In the first day of this semester, a lecturer showed us a useful app: Mendeley. The name reminded me to something. I just remembered about library collection numbering system. But no, it’s Dewey system actually (I googled it just now). Or perhaps it’s more similar to a name of something about chemical. Umm… Mendeleev’s periodic table! Forget it! There’s nothing to do with chemical actually. It’s just an unrequited love of me. LOL

Mendeley is a reference manager and an academic social network. My lecturer showed us how he uses it to monitor the progress of his related researches over the world. It’s about economics. He also uses it as a citation manager for his papers. He showed us how easy to generate the citation from certain paper for bibliography, with just copy it from its menu and then we just need to paste it to word processing app, like MS Word.

Mendeley can be downloaded from its official page in this link. It supports all major operating systems, including Linux. For Linux itself, there are two options: for Ubuntu family and for “generic Linux”, that means a pre-compiled binary for all Linux distro variants. As I use Fedora, I chose the latter. I just had to extract the tarball, and then executed the file ./bin/mendeleydesktop either from terminal or double click the file. We need to register a free account on the Mendeley website to use this app, anyway.

I was interested to give it a try, as I saw another option to generate the citation format other than Formatted citation. They’re LaTeX custom command and BibTex entry formats. Actually I haven’t needed it yet, after all.

I tried the Bibtex entry format option, as you can see from above screenshot. Then I created the .bib file manually from copied text. And then I appended the citation to the LaTeX file. Just like below screenshot.

It’s so convenient to organized the citation using Mendeley. I start imagining to be a researcher and write some useful papers by utilizing it.