iTunes for research papers

Thanks to Victor Keegan in the Technology Guardian for bringing attention to this great looking piece of software...

Mendeley is a "research management tool for desktop & web" that's free and network enabled. My favourite feature? The way you can keep tabs on what other people who do research in your area are reading - all anonymously, of course:

Explore research trends and statistics

Mendeley allows you to discover and aggregate anonymous statistics about research trends. You can view the most popular authors, papers, journals and tags in your academic discipline, and discover interesting statistics about your own research paper library. These include viewing the number of papers by specific authors, most frequently used tags, the number of articles in your library, the number of authors and the number of references cited by these papers. You can also view your top publication outlets by topic. These statistics allow you to have a good overview of what your research habits and priorities are at this time.

The Mendeley team were among the organisers of the Science Online London 2009 event recently. The programme looks really impressive - and hopefully some of the presentations will make their way online soon...