The right tools for the job

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!