Mendeley can serve as a heavy-duty citation manager, suitable for long-term research projects and is also a great tool for organizing a robust collection of PDFs. Mendeley also provides users with a rich social networking experience (similar to that of Last.fm). Mendeley allows you to make your work discoverable to other researchers. You can also easily share resources with collaborators using Mendeley groups.
Mendeley is a citation management tool that, like many others, lets you collect and organize citations, and then easily insert them into documents and format bibliographies. But it also lets you drag and drop PDFs into your library and extracts the metadata for you--voila, you have a library! It automatically renames PDFs with the author last name, title, and date, so that you no longer have goups of PDFs titled "fulltext.pdf."
You can highlight and annotate your PDFs and share them with others. Colleagues can then also annotate the same document, with each author displaying as a different color.
Use more than one computer? It's not a problem! Download Mendeley Desktop to as many computers as you want, then synch them with a click of your mouse. Need to use your library away from your computer? Mendeley Web gives you access to your citations no matter where you are.
Mendeley is social: create a profile, follow other researchers, create a network of people doing similar research. Discover the articles and journals that are being read in your field right now.
Create collections of papers. Make them public and share them with an RSS feed (great for class reading lists!).
Mendeley's free version has some limitations on space(1 GB web storage, 500 MB each for personal shared storage) and users (5) and shared collections (10), but you can purchase premium plans for more web and personal storage space and more users and shared groups.
Mendeley's User Forum lets you suggest changes to the program and then shows you how many votes your idea has and if Mendeley is going to use it.
Known Issues
If you need more help with Mendeley
This work is an adaptation of the Mendeley Basics LibGuide by the University of Michigan's Taubman Health Sciences Library and is subject to a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license (details and exceptions) and a portion of the guide titled Citation Tools by Marie Sciangula, which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 United States License.
Subsequent re-use of this adaptation by Brigitte Galauner is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 United States License.