New Annals of Botany Bibliographies

At the suggestion of Alan Cann and AoB’s managing editor David Frost I’ve been working on a new section for the website. Up on the menu bar above there should be a Bibliographies option. It’s part of our move into Mendeley.

Mendeley is a desktop application and website that helps with research support. On the desktop it can manage your PDF files and help as a citation manager. You also install a bookmarklet in your browser so that when you see a paper you like you can click Import into Mendeley and the paper is in your collection of references. It’s also possible for you to share collections of references, which is handy for collaborative work.

The change this week is that they’ve now released an API and that means data can be pulled out of the site. We’ve used a plugin written by Prof. Dr. Michael Koch. There are still some problems, but this is partly due to Mendeley having a low rate limit for queries while they develop the API. I’ll be trying to solve that with caching the results on the website.

At the moment all the papers come from one journal. In the longer term we intend to add papers from non-AoB journals as well to make the collections comprehensive starting point for research on topics. In the meantime you can download Mendeley for free and get organising your digital archive.