Does anyone here have any experience of using Mendeley (mendeley.com/) with Scrivener? I was a a bit surprised to find no hits on the LL forum for it given the publicity it’s had recently. It looks like an interesting (and free) way to manage bibliographic records and article PDFs etc. but I’m not sure if there’s any easy way to integrate with writing in Scrivener. (There is a Word plug-in but it’s Windows-only so far, with a Mac version promised “soon”.)
Mendeley have some interesting social/Web 2.0 features, e.g. you can share “Collections” (i.e. list of articles etc.) with all others (if just the biblio record is shared) or with up to 10 participants (if the PDF file is shared - lower limit presumably to try to avoid copyright infringement claims). They say they have over 8 million records uploaded and talk about being the Last.fm of science, whatever that means.
I have been trying it out, but I just finished integrating Papers into my workflow, so am loath to make the switch again. Mendeley seems better at getting metadata than Papers, but till the word importer (for creating bibliographies) appears, I will wait. The other problem with Mendeley seems to be in Journal styles. There’s almost nothing that I can use, and there’s no way to make your own (as far as I know).
One of the things I like about it is that it can import all your CiteULike references, not just a one-off import but complete one-way sync (and I think I heard that that has recently become two-way). That means I don’t have to commit to switching unless and until I want to. I think the Web app/Mac app/Windows app model is a really good one and as you said the shared collections are pretty exciting.
It seems to me that people interested in using Mendeley with Scrivener need to get Mendeley to support RTF document scans. This can be voted for on Mendeley’s feedback forum: feedback.mendeley.com/forums/494 … d-rtf-scan