This is a bit of a tangent but a relevant and useful one!
Having got the e commerce research group back off the ground
after a rather long sabbatical, I have found myself re-visiting the various
bibliographic tools I used to use in order for the group to attempt to manage
the somewhat jumbled knowledge we have and are steadily accumulating. And lo
and behold, I think I have finally found the holy grail; a web based management tool that does
everything I want it to. Mendeley (https://www.mendeley.com/) did exist 5
years ago, but steady development and updates has resulted in a slick and
intuitive piece of software that is just as happy living on your phone as it is
within your browser or on your desktop.
What’s more, it has some nifty functionality that I have struggled to
find elsewhere. For me, the greatest strength
of Medeley is its’ ability to suck up an entire folder of research articles (in
full text) and instantly format them into tidy, exportable references. Yes you can do this as you go with various extensions,
but the simple drag and drop function works very well and enables me to
continue researching in the way I always have then worry about the
bibliographic management later on. The
ability to create multiple groups to collaborate on research topics is another
key feature of Mendeley. Yes Dropbox or
Google can do this but the functionality you get with Mendeley (annotations,
highlighting, notes, tags etc) is hard to beat, and open reference lists are a
great way to share what you are doing with the wider world.
As you would expect, Mendeley has adopted the standard
freemium model; you get 2GB of storage
for free (which isn’t bad considering the average size of a PDF), £3.99 a month
gets you 5GB, £7.99 gets you 10GB and for £11.99 you can store as much as you
like.
Another, more specific tool in the context of our research
project that I feel is worthy of a quick review is
Wappalyzer (https://wappalyzer.com ) . This Browser extension has proved
invaluable for the initial stages of our data gathering as it provides simple
details of the back end technologies on which a web site is built. The information is displayed directly in the
browsers address bar as icons that can be clicked on for more in-depth
statistics. And that’s it; simple but effective. The extension is available for all major
browsers and is free.
Right, now we have the right tools for the job we can crack
on!
