App

As students juggling assignments, presentations, projects and other co-curricular activities, more often than not many of us feel like our time has been stretched too thin.

The solution to this would be to learn how to manage our time properly, but there is another solution that some might have overlooked: Utilizing tools that enable us to work more efficiently.

As a self-confessed tech geek, I have tried and tested numerous applications, trying to find the best apps that would enable me to work better. Over the years, I have fallen in love with many applications and discarded even more.

In this article, I will be sharing 5 of the applications I use regularly in my life as an undergraduate.

App #1: Mendeley

Use: Organizing literature and writing papers
Desktop app: Windows, Mac, Linux
Mobile app: iPad, iOS
Price: Free; storage space free up to 2GB

1.1 Why I use this appOne of the problems I faced when doing research is organizing all the literature (i.e., journals, PDFs, eBooks, conference papers, etc.) I gathered from the Internet. The more papers I wrote, the more literature I collected and the more confused I got with all my resources.

The second problem I faced was that I hated having to manually key in the citations according to a specific citation format. I spent a long time just writing, sorting and editing the bibliography of my papers, time that I could spend doing something else.

Mendeley solved both of my issues (and other issues I did not even knew existed!).

1.2 App walkthrough

What is Mendeley?
Mendeley is a free reference manager that helps you to organize your research, collaborate with others online and discover the latest research.

Why you should use this app


Mendeley allows you to organize your literature into folders and then sort the literature in those folders according to author, title, year published, and even the journal title.

It also allows you to highlight and insert notes directly onto the PDF itself, thus making it easy for you to locate the important information you found earlier.

It has a search function that allows you to search across all your documents, both in the titles of papers and their contents.

It gives you the ability to insert citations automatically, according to the format you require (side note: you will have to install the Microsoft Word plug-in here first).

After inserting citations throughout your paper using the Mendeley plug-in, all you have to do to insert your entire bibliography is to click the above button. Mendeley will extract all the information automatically and create your bibliography for you in seconds.

1.3 The Good

• Organization capabilities
• One-click citation and bibliography
• Search open access libraries for more references
• iPad and iPhone applications allow you to read your papers on the go

1.4 The Bad

• Sometimes (rarely) crashes
• Online storage space free only until 2GB

1.5 Other RemarksSince I started using the app last year, I have never found the need to find another application to replace Mendeley. It does what it is supposed to, is beautifully designed compared with other similar apps I have seen and saves a lot of my time. The 2GB online storage limitation is not that big of an issue as it should be enough to store hundreds of files.

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