Looking for law journal or related articles online but want to have some help organizing them? You may already be using Zotero, which I discuss in the text or CiteULike, which I posted about earlier. Here is another promising tool for finding and managing research papers you locate online.
Mendeley Research Networks goes beyond a storage add-on, though. You can use their search tool to locate papers based on keyword or browse down through a variety of topics, including law, to see what is available. Since Mendeley is indexing information from all over, you can dig up a wide selection of content.
Two things I particularly liked about Mendeley. First, it is tapping into paid sites so that I could read an abstract for a paper from Irwin Law, for example, even though I couldn’t actually access it. Second, it has links to the home site, and so I was able to follow up on an Australian paper written about Canadian copyright law in one click. Since it indicates the source, you can copy and paste citations into your public library’s remote access databases (like Ebscohost) and retrieve the document.
The Mendeley team appears to have spent a lot of time on the clean interface, which is pretty intuitive although the research papers menu doesn’t jump out at you as the location from which to search. It’s also fast at retrieving matching results.
You can add the paper to your free online Mendeley account, like CiteULike, but there is also a free stand-alone application you can download and install on Windows or Macintosh. There are is also one-click sharing, so that you can send it to your Facebook page, e-mail it to a colleague, or add it to your Google Bookmarks.
