I want to make a long overdue recommendation for all my scientific colleagues to check out Mendeley, a fantastic online reference manager. It’s also been billed as an academic social network, but for me, the real value in Mendeley lies in its ability to collect and categorize references.

Basically, a Mendeley account is a database of bibliographic data and associated PDF files. You can add references while browsing the web using an importer bookmarklet, which works with many different websites including the arXiv and APS journals. Unlike other automatic bibliographic sources (ahem Google Scholar), importing directly from the official site gives you fairly complete and consistent data. You can also supplement it using the arXiv or DOI lookup in Mendeley’s desktop client, or by filling in fields manually. The desktop client also allows you to read papers using a builtin PDF viewer (or an external program of your choice), as well as add annotations and notes. It’s cross-platform, available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, and it’s overall pretty well designed, especially for a free program. Of course, Mendeley also provides a web interface by which you can access your reference database from any browser. All these different “portals” automatically sync with the website so your reference list is always up to date no matter where you go.

If you’re not convinced by the “sales pitch,” though, just trust me that using Mendeley to organize my papers has drastically improved my workflow. Actually, don’t trust me — try it for yourself! And if you join, don’t forget to look me up on the site!