Another metadata extraction experiment

Several months ago I was comparing how well Mendeley and Zotero reference managers ingested digital content and "spat out" formatted APA citations.

In that first metadata extraction experiment, I used four article PDFs ranging in date from 1989 to 2011. I did not try other resources commonly referred to in graduate study, such as conference proceedings or -- ahem -- books.  (Let's not forget books!)

So, this time I will try a basic webpage (actually, a Flickr image), a conference proceeding from an online database, and a book. For the book, I "grabbed" its data from the Amazon.com web page.

First, I must acknowledge that both Mendeley and Zotero provide multiple avenues for adding content to your library, from "single-click" technology to manual entry, if necessary. I decided to put the single-click option to the test because the functionality of this option is going to make or break the tool, at least in my mind.

When you install Zotero, built-in icons/buttons appear in your browser's location bar. Mendeley provides a web importer button that you can drop-and-drag into your bookmarks toolbar.

So, here we go again.  As in my initial post, I utilized both Mendeley's and Zotero's capability for inserting formatted citations by drag-and-drop technology straight into the text editor of this blog. (The drag-and-drop piece is almost flawless within both applications, but I personally prefer Zotero's split-screen format that integrates with my browser and mimics the iTunes interface.)

For comparison purposes, I added my manually formatted APA citations first, with the Mendeley and Zotero citations following. I changed the text color within citations to indicate deviations from APA or missing information.

Manually formatted APA citations:

Belshaw, D. (2010, Oct. 3). Pragmatism, critical theory and post-structuralism. Retrieved from http://www.flickr.com/photos/dougbelshaw/5046693346/

Jorgensen, M.W., & Phillips, L.J. (2002). Discourse analysis as theory and method. London: SAGE Publications Ltd.

Williams, M.K., Wetzel, K., Foulger, T., Kisicki, T., & Giacumo, L. (2011). Explicitly addressing TPACK in preservice teacher curriculum. In M. Koehler & P. Mishra (Eds.), Proceedings of Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference 2011 (pp. 4429-4434). Chesapeake, VA: AACE.

  
Mendeley drop-and-drag citations:

Missing author name. pragmatism, critical theory and post-structuralism. (n.d.). Retrieved February 16, 2012, from http://www.flickr.com/photos/dougbelshaw/5046693346/

Jorgensen, M. W., & Phillips, L. J. (2002). Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method (p. 230). Missing place name: Sage Publications Ltd. Retrieved from http://www.amazon.com/Discourse-Analysis-as-Theory-Method/dp/0761971122

Williams, M. K., Wetzel, K., Foulger, T., Kisicki, T., & Giacumo, L. (n.d.). Explicitly Addressing TPACK in Preservice Teacher Curriculum. Missing editors' names, Proceedings of Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference 2011 (Vol. 2011, pp. 4429 - 4434). Missing place and publisher. Retrieved from http://editlib.org/p/37030

Zotero drop-and-drag citations:

Belshaw, D. (2010, October 3). Pragmatism, Critical Theory and Post-structuralism. Retrieved February 16, 2012, from http://www.flickr.com/photos/dougbelshaw/5046693346/

Jorgensen, M. W., & Phillips, L. J. (2002). Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method (1st ed.). Missing place name: Sage Publications Ltd.

Williams, M. K., Wetzel, K., Foulger, T., Kisicki, T., & Giacumo, L. (20110307). Explicitly Addressing TPACK in Preservice Teacher Curriculum. Missing editors' names, Proceedings of Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference 2011 (Vol. 2011, pp. 4429–4434). Missing place and publisher. Retrieved from http://editlib.org/p/37030

I hate to say it, but I still think it's a draw. What do you think?

Another metadata extraction experiment

Off the fence at last? Conducting a PDF metadata extraction experiment

Photo by twobee at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

As a PhD student entering her third year of studies, I think it's time for me to get off the fence about reference management software. I've muddled through the last two years, cobbling together reference pages in APA style and exploring, but never fully committing to, Zotero.

When I started my PhD program in Fall 2009, I chose to do my first literature review with open-source Zotero instead of the proprietary EndNote software that my institution supports.

I learned to love open-source applications when I took a course from Dr. Jay Pfaffman as an Instructional Technology master's student. With Zotero's Firefox plugin, I could create and own my own bibliographic database that synced with my Zotero web account, meaning it was accessible from any computer with an Internet connection.

I finished the literature review using Zotero to organize and tag my files and then automatically generate an APA-formatted bibliography. But under the crush of my course load and the multitude of distractions and obligations that go with doctoral-level work, I never gave myself the time to explore Zotero's interface and documentation.  I never used Zotero to take notes on my resources, nor did I take advantage of its word processor plug-ins for cite-and-write functionality. It all seemed so complicated.

I was printing, photocopying, underlining, annotating, and sticky-noting mounds of literature and basically using Zotero as the digital equivalent of 3x5 bib cards, which most people of a certain age can remember from their high school and college English classes. In and of itself, the ability to automatically generate a list of works cited is a nice thing, but is that enough value-added "worth investing money and time in?" (Hensley, 2011, p. 205) I'm pretty sure I could alphabetize my bib cards and word-process my bibliography the "old-fashioned" way in about the same amount of time it takes to fool with Zotero.

Now, in EP604 we are learning about the next generation of citation management software. These programs, including Zotero, aspire to do more and may possibly alter the entire academic research experience.  Zotero, for instance, has released an alpha version of a free-standing desktop application as part of the larger Zotero Everywhere project. Meanwhile, Mendeley, a commercial, cross-platform application, is already just about everywhere, with desktop, web, and mobile apps.

Both Zotero and Mendeley draw on social media functionality to provide a collaborative platform for public and private research groups.  But Mendeley has upped the ante with what it calls "Knowledge Discovery," which draws on readership statistics to predict research trends and to push new content out to users.  Another step toward the Googlification of everything.

Mendeley claims to be the "world's largest crowd-sourced library," and I am interested in the impact of collaboration and social networking on the research experience.   But for the moment, I have more pressing needs. I want a citation management tool that will integrate seamlessly with my conversion to paperless and that will help me reign in and organize two years' worth of scattered resources.

Ideally, I would like a tool that functions both as a document reader and a citation manager, but I am not at all impressed with either Mendeley's or Zotero's annotating capabilities.  To make matters worse, the Mendeley iPad app repeatedly crashes even after being uninstalled and re-installed. (Zotero doesn't even have an iPad app, although one appears to be in the works). I've resolved this issue by using a different iPad app to annotate and export "flattened" PDFs to Dropbox, a process I will describe in more detail in a future post.

If I outsource reading and annotating to an iOS app and put networking and collaboration on the back burner for the time being, that leaves me with the same basic question about reference managers that Aaron Tay posed last year on his Musings about Librarianship blog: "How good are they at figuring out citations from PDFs?"  Tay ran a series of "non-scientific tests" to see how well EndNote, Mendeley, WizFolio, and Zotero ingested a collection of 10 PDFs he downloaded from the Internet.

Using five bibliographic fields (article title, author, publication year, journal volume and issue number, and page numbers), Tay evaluated the results for each of the ten articles. A "pass" meant the software extracted correct information for all five fields, a "partial" indicated at least one field was satisfied, and a "fail" meant no bibliographic information was found. EndNote and WizFolio each had five "fails," and Mendeley and Zotero had a respectable combination of "passes" and "partials," with Zotero having the most passes of all.

Since a year has gone by with many upgrades and fixes along the way, I thought it would be interesting to try a scaled-down version of Tay's metadata experiment.  I used four articles from my desktop representing a range of years (from 1989 to 2011) and what I hoped would be a range of PDF versions, with and without DOIs, etc. I focused exclusively on Mendeley and Zotero; other than that, I followed all the steps that Tay described in his original post.

To make it more interesting, I utilized both applications' capability for inserting formatted citations by drag-and-drop technology straight into the text editor of this blog. I had never tried this before with either Mendeley or Zotero and was eager to see how it works. (BTW, the drag-and-drop piece was super easy with both applications, but I prefer Zotero's split-screen format that integrates with the Firefox browser better than resizing the Mendeley Desktop window.)

For comparison purposes, I copied and pasted my manually formatted APA citations first, with the Mendeley and Zotero citations following. I changed the text color within citations to indicate deviations from APA or missing information.

Manually formatted APA citations:  

Brown, J. S., Collins, A., & Duguid, P. (1989). Situated cognition and the culture of learning. Educational Researcher, 18(1), 32-42.

Mishra, P. & Koehler, M. J. (2006). Technological pedagogical content knowledge: A framework for teacher knowledge. Teachers College Record, 108(6), 1017-1054.

O’Bannon, B. W., Lubke, J. K., Beard, J. L., & Britt, V. G. (2011). Using podcasts to replace lecture: Effects on student achievement. Computers & Education, 57, 1885-1892. doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2011.04.001

The New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review, 66(1), 60-92.

Mendeley citations (note automatic insertion of some DOIs):

Brown, J. S., Collins, A., & Duguid, P. (1989). Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning. Educational Researcher, 18(1), 32(missing page range). doi:10.2307/1176008

MISHRA, P., & KOEHLER, M. J. (2006). Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge: A Framework for Teacher Knowledge. Teachers College Record, 108(6), 1017-1054. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9620.2006.00684.x

O’Bannon, B. W., Lubke, J. K., Beard, J. L., & Britt, V. G. (2011). Using podcasts to replace lecture: Effects on student achievement. Computers & Education, 57(3), 1885-1892. doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2011.04.001

No author. A pedagogy of multiliteracies : Designing social futures. (1996). Library. (No journal, volume or issue number, or page numbers)

Zotero citations (note automatic double-spacing):

Brown, J. S., Collins, A., & Duguid, P. (1989). Situated cognition and the culture of learning. Educational researcher, 18(1), 32(missing page range).

Mishra, P., & Koehler, M. J. (2006). Technological pedagogical content knowledge: A framework for teacher knowledge. Teachers college record, 108(6), 1017(missing page range).

O’Bannon, B. W., Lubke, J. K., Beard, J. L., & Britt, V. G. (2011). Using Podcasts to Replace Lecture: Effects on Student Achievement. Computers & Education. (No volume or page numbers)

Pedagogy+of+Multiliteracies_New+London+Group.pdf. (n.d.). . Retrieved from http://vassarliteracy.pbworks.com/f/Pedagogy+of+Multiliteracies_New+London+Group.pdf (Hmmm. Just really messed up!)

So, should I stick it out with Zotero or make the leap to Mendeley?

I like that Mendeley located and added the DOIs for three out of the four documents.  I like how Zotero automatically double-spaces.  The 1996 article by The New London Group is just all the way around problematic and perhaps should not have been included in my little "experiment," but it is a seminal writing in the field of literacy and I will need it in my web-based library at some point.  Another limitation is the fact that I did not include at least one example of a conference proceeding to see how the two reference managers performed in that situation.  I probably should run another test with a proceedings paper before I choose a tool.

Or, do I even have to choose? According to Julie Meloni at the ProfHacker blog, it is easy to import Zotero resources to Mendeley, and, "Given the syncing abilities, it would be possible (and not terribly difficult or time consuming) to, say, work with Zotero as your primary tool yet sync with Mendeley so as to increase the content in your field and just add to the community in general."

What would you do?

Off the fence at last? Conducting a PDF metadata extraction experiment

More reflections on CAQDAS

A few years ago while working on my master's in Instructional Technology, I was searching for creative uses of the ubiquitous PowerPoint and stumbled upon a column by artist/musician David Byrne in which he described his first encounter with the presentation software.  Byrne hated the application, calling it "limiting, inflexible, and biased." Despite this, Byrne decided to take up the medium anyway, in order to satirize it.

Then something strange happened.

Byrne realized he could make PowerPoint function as a "metaprogram" in which he could organize all his multimedia content into something "beautiful." He wrote, "I could bend the program to my own whim and use it as an artistic agent.... I could make works that were 'about' something, something beyond themselves, and that they could even have emotional resonance."

Guided by his curiosity and artistic vision, Byrne successfully and effectively co-opted an evil business software and turned it into a creative platform.  This idea really appealed to me at the time because we classroom teachers have been doing that sort of thing for a long time (gradebooks in Excel spreadsheets, writing workshops in MsWord).  

I was reminded of Byrne's artwork this week as I completed the EP604 course readings on CAQDAS, several of which made mention of the historical distrust of computers among some qualitative researchers. In their 1996 paper Qualitative Data Analysis: Technologies and Representations, which, interestingly, was published in what had to have been one of the very first digital journals of social science research, Coffey, Holbrook and Atkinson describe a tension between the increasingly diverse methods of contemporary ethnographic research and a trend towards homogeneity imposed by the "computing moment."

A section of Seale's chapter in Doing Qualitative Research poses this question: "Do computers impose a narrowly exclusive approach to the analysis of qualitative data?" (p. 257)

Following this week's readings and then last night's class discussion, I am convinced the answer is "no." The early fears about "orthodoxy" and "homogeneity" are unfounded. It seems that the qualitative researcher, confident of and consistent in her own methodology, can leverage the power of these seemingly positivist tools to do some powerful meaning making (Friese, 2011; Seale, 2010).

As a former public school teacher, I know a little about oppressive orthodoxies. There is an insidious strain of orthodoxy that pervades K-12 education, and it goes by the innocuous name of "best practice." It's actually very odd. Teachers are told, on the one hand, to implement research-based best practices, while, on the other hand, most progressive education reforms focus on making instruction individualized and learner-centered, not scripted and standardized. In other words, what's "best" for one child may not be "best" for another.  The only "best" practice is what works at a given time, in a given context, with a given student.

Now, as a novice qualitative researcher, I am visiting my classmates' blogs, attending software webinars, participating in EP604 class discussions, and thinking about "best practices" again, this time in light of "digital convergence" (Brown). The digital tools, by their very design, are exploding the notion. Rather than impose a singular and "right" way, the tools are to be explored, evaluated, and adapted to fit our epistemological and methodological needs (Brown; Friese; Seale).

For example:

• Last night we were provided an overview of two CAQDAS tools, QDAMiner and Transana. Both programs imposed an a priori approach to coding, but our instructor suggested a trick to bypass that: simply create a generic code such as "quotes" or "clips" to use during the first cycle of coding.
• In her article Using Atlas.ti for Analyzing the Financial Crisis Data, Friese describes in detail how, feeling the grounded theory approach to be inadequate, she devised her own idiosyncratic analytic procedures, which slowly evolved into what she calls "computer-assisted NCT analysis."  In her conclusion, Friese asserts that her coding and analysis process would be the same regardless of the software package she chose.
• In an earlier post I shared what I was learning about Mendeley which performs double-duty as both a citation manager and a collaborative platform for scholarly research. According to its developers, Mendeley is highly individualized to fit the "idiosyncratic processes of researchers." I wondered about Mendeley as a place for self-publishing.Could it be it is the very embodiment of Brown's "scenario," in which the "massification" of "combined technologies could...provide the opportunity for the proliferation and democratization of the production and dissemination of qualitative research knowledge"? 

Mendeley as a "scholarly Facebook"? Probably not. But I like to think about the possibilities. Even Coffey, Holbrook and Atkinson (1996) concluded that the contemporary ethnographer should give the proliferation of digital tools "serious and systematic" attention or risk becoming a "dreadful anachronism."

P.S. Just for fun, here is a PowerPoint animation set to a remix of Canon in D.  Nothing anachronistic here.

More reflections on CAQDAS

More on Mendeley

from OpenClipArt.org

I've been tidying up my Mendeley library, checking on citation formats, organizing readings into folders, attaching my annotated PDFs, and experimenting with what happens to annotated Diigo web pages when added to the library.  (BTW: the Diigo/Mendeley part really works! I don't know why I am surprised by this, but I think this level of integration is cool!  For example, I accessed a recent column from The Chronicle of Higher Education, highlighted important points using Diigo, and then added the link to Mendeley.)

Other aspects of building the Mendeley library have not been so cool. I have tons of reading material related to my frameworks, previous coursework, and past lit reviews that I eventually want to add to Mendeley, but, for the time being, I decided to to focus on the material at hand: the several journal articles, research studies, and book chapters required for EP604, "Digital Tools for Qualitative Research."

Basically, I began by creating an EP604 folder inside Mendeley Desktop.  After I read and annotate an EP604 PDF using an iPad reader app, I "flatten" the annotated version and send it to my Dropbox, at which point I rename the PDF using a standard format of "author_year_annotated." From Dropbox, I can quickly add the PDF file to Mendeley Desktop.  (I will explain this process in more detail in a future post, including my final verdict on which iPad annotator I like the best.)

Once inside Mendeley Desktop, things aren't so efficient and seamless. I don't know if I am missing something, but I have found it necessary to manually add most of the information about each EP604 course document.  This takes as much time as if I was using any other citation management software, and my data input abilities are always error prone. Occasionally, the information for articles from online journals will automatically "pop up" in the reference fields, but more often than not, I must painstakingly enter the title in the right APA format, along with author, year, volume number, issue number, and so on.  

The automatic DOI search feature does work efficiently for filling in reference information for items with an available DOI.  But I can't for the life of me imagine why I would have the DOI number on hand, unless I locate the document myself on the Web, such as with Google Scholar or a library database. For the current task at hand, this represents a major duplication of effort, as all the course documents were supplied via the EP604 course management site.

Insofar as managing references, I obviously (and mistakenly) expected Mendeley to magically deliver me from the tedium of manual entry.  Clearly, I have to lower my expectations and take comfort in the fact that the time I invest now in maintaining my library will pay off later when I need to generate a list of works cited.

So, why use Mendeley at all?  Why not stick with Zotero, which I have used in the past, or try EndNote, which is supported by my university? Well, I am just deeply committed to this idea of controlling my own database both from within the cloud and locally on my computer, even if I have to pay a little extra for more server space. (I am currently using close to 15 percent of my free 500 MB after just two weeks.)  

More importantly, I am intrigued by the give-and-take between Internet as an act of research and Internet as source of research.  I am also curious about this persistent theme in EP604 that suggests digital technologies are supporting conventional research practices but also changing them.  I think Mendeley possibly exemplifies all of this.

The July 19 Mendeley webinar for educational researchers, for example, emphasized that Mendeley was more than a citation manager.  The presenter referred to it as  "a crowd-sourced, publicly searched catalog of research." The Mendeley web client functions as a "collaborative platform." As researchers search for, share, and retrieve data, Mendeley aggregates the "community's processes," supplying readership statistics and disciplinary trends back to its members.

Moreover, according to its developers, Mendeley is highly individualized to fit the "idiosyncratic processes of researchers."  It supposedly has seven different ways to add documents and is compatible with more than a 1000 citation styles!

As I listened, I wondered about Mendeley as a place for self-publishing and dissemination of research.  If the Mendeley community were to grow exponentially, becoming some sort of scholarly version of Facebook, would community members simply bypass the "old guard" of peer-reviewed research journals? Talk about changed practices!

I would love to continue to explore these big ideas, but for my EP604 skill-building project, I also need to attend to some practical concerns that have come up for me in recent days:  

• If there are indeed seven different ways to add docs to Mendeley, perhaps I need to keep practicing until I find the most efficient way?
• I am interested in the TPACK framework for technology and teacher education.  I want to find out if there is a Mendeley group for TPACK.  If not, should I start one?
• Would it be possible to integrate Mendeley with this blog in some way?  Is that advisable? Does Mendeley provide member badges? It's worth a look-see. . . .

More on Mendeley

EP604 skill-building activities

Here are my two ideas for skill-building projects in EP604:

• Mendeley  I will complete my profile, join some public groups (perhaps?), build and organize my library, and figure out the best way (that works for me) to upload, store, and share annotated PDFs.  If I have time, I would like to compare Mendeley to Zotero, which I used last year on a collaborative lit review about podcasting.  I haven't played with Zotero in a while. I see this project as supporting my personal goal to go paperless this year. See Working with Mendeley and More on Mendeley for my current reflections on this project.

• Inqscribe  I will use this tool to complete transcription for a study on the use of eBooks during Kindergarten literacy instruction. This project will challenge my skills at reflexivity because the lead investigator on the study has not prescribed a format for the transcripts.  As I teach myself how to create "shortcuts" and "snippets" with Inqscribe, I will also have to use my developing expertise about the transcription process to figure out how to accurately and adequately represent the essence of children's emergent readings. This is crucial, as the data will be interpreted to determine what impact exposure to eBooks had on their developing literacy.

EP604 skill-building activities

Paperless, Part I

By hook or by crook, by laptop or by handheld, I'm going paperless.  

At the outset of my third year of doctoral studies, I get knots in my stomach when I look at the accumulation of books flagged with sticky notes and the crates of binders overloaded with highlighted articles, conference papers, and research studies. 

So, paperless academic reading is my latest "new routine." But I'm taking baby steps, starting with one class. This summer in EP604, I will not print a single page of the assigned journal articles or book chapters  -- not one page of the 521 pages of required reading. (That's more than a ream of single-sided copies.)

Instead, I am downloading the digital files from our course website into an application for reading and annotating PDFs. Then, I am "flattening" and exporting the marked-up PDFs to my virtual library, which, for the moment, is housed at Mendeley.com. (See also my post Working with Mendeley.) Mendeley is a web-based personal citation and reference manager that enables users to store their research documents on remote servers, or "in the cloud."  That means I can access my personal collection of EP604 course readings anytime, anywhere, provided I have a reliable Internet connection and web browser.

Let's be honest here.  Cloud computing may sound all warm and fuzzy and environmentally conscious.  But this is not about saving trees. For me, at least, it's about saving my sanity.

Anyone (read:  "any sleep-deprived graduate student") who has desperately thumbed through stacks of paper at 2 a.m., searching for that singular, seminal piece of writing -- that 37-page, heavily annotated and many-times-read journal article -- only to realize she has left the printout on her desk at school, can understand the value of the "cloud."

Managing one's resources in graduate school has surely never been easy. Now, ironically, digital and web-based technologies provide greater ease and efficiency with which to gather mass amounts of information, while making it more difficult to stay organized. According to Anderson and Kanuka, authors of E-Research: Methods, Strategies and Issues, "...[T]he amount of valuable research information available 'anywhere/anytime' continues to grow," and more time is needed for "assessing relevance and veracity" (2003, pp. 41-42).

When one factors in Hart's assertion that the graduate student "is expected to search more widely, across disciplines, and in greater detail than at undergraduate level" (1999, p. 9), there is major imperative for adopting and refining the practice of reading in digital and online environments.

In sum, my tools for converting to paperless are (so far): 

• citation management software (Mendeley is one example, but I would like to compare it later to Zotero.)
• a PDF annotator
• Dropbox.com

What other tools might I consider?  And, more importantly, what is the value-added of going paperless and what are the costs?  I will explore these questions in future posts.

Paperless, Part I

Working with Mendeley

I attended a webinar this week to learn more about the personal citation manager Mendeley, which I have started using this week (with mixed results, so far). I established an account and user profile at the Mendeley website, and I downloaded the desktop application to my PC, which syncs with the web account. I also installed the mobile Mendeley Lite app on an iPad.

In an effort to go "paperless" this academic year (more on this later), I was especially motivated to try the desktop version of Mendeley, which provides highlighter and note tools. Yet, after reading and marking up one PDF file, I could not successfully save or export the file with its annotations. Each time I attempt to do this, the application crashes and closes. Consequently, I cannot see my annotations anywhere except locally on my own laptop within the Mendeley Desktop environment.  They do not appear inside the library within the Mendeley "cloud," and the cloud, according to today's webinar presenter, is just what makes Mendeley so special!

Meanwhile, I have not been able to explore the functionality of MendeleyLite because it continually crashes on my iPad.

Frustration! 

I suspect the problem with Desktop relates to different versions of PDFs, depending on when and how the file specifications were generated.  But I really don't have the time nor the inclination to explore the issue in-depth. At any rate, I have already located a handful of other PDF readers/annotators that upload reliably to Dropbox, enabling me to then download my marked-up pages to the Mendeley library.

Still, out of curiosity, I raised the issue during the Mendeley webinar and was pleased with the timely manner in which the presenter responded. But she didn't tell me anything I didn't already know, except to contact support, which I have done.

The overall purpose of the Mendeley webinar was to provide a broad overview of its features. I learned about some new tricks I can do with my Mendeley reference library, such as:

• Synch with my account in Zotero, another web-based citation manager
• Create "watch" folders on my desktop that synch with Mendeley each time I add new content
• Use the document identifying number (DOI) to fill in missing information on a resource

On a broader scale, I can view and sometimes access what others are reading within the Mendeley community, which numbers in the millions. I can also connect with other researchers in my discipline who share my interests, thanks to a variety of social networking features the Mendeley developers added.  

This is what Hensley (2011) was referring to when she described the development of Mendeley as " a clear indication of the future direction for research tools." According to Hensley, developers will continue "to look for ways to embed the organization of research materials, add social collaboration features, and incorporate compatibility with smartphones and tablet technology."

Mendeley, it seems, exemplifies the  "potential of digital convergence" that Brown described back in 2002 in his article "Going Digital and Staying Qualitative."

It sounds great. It really does. But for now, all I want is a citation manager that does double-duty as an e-reading utility, or that at least "plays nice" with the other tools in my digital toolbox.  

Working with Mendeley