Description

‘Mendeley Comparison Grid’ aims to help you distinguish your research. When building up your literature report, the comparison grid helps you distinguish which papers have done what and when, but importantly what hasn’t been done. Enabling people easily see what the gap or difference between your work and others is.

Current version uses the Mendeley ‘tags’ to embed data for your generated grid. As the Mendeley API evolves so will this application.

ScreenShots

Tutorial (Steps)

[1] You need to set tags in Mendeley which the application extracts and uses to configure your chart. (Once Mendeley API evolves this will be modified to allow you to update your Mendeley data from the program, till then you have to set it from inside Mendeley).

Each paper has tags set, e.g.

Paper 0

Tags:

paper:robotics;realtime:yes;type:controller

Paper 1

Tags:

paper:robotics;realtime:no

Once you’ve added your tags, your ready to use the program, start up the Comparison Grid program.

[2] Click the button, ‘Grab Data Mendeley’. This will grab the information from each document from Mendeley. It will display the log status as it iterates through the papers.

[3] Click the button, ‘Build Comparison Chart’. This will show you the generated table. Goto Home tab to change if you want just the first author or all authors displayed. Additionally you can have only papers included from specific folders.

Background To The Comparison Grid (The Whys and Whats)

What is the problem?

Easily identify how your research differs from others and what your contribution is.

Why is it interesting and important?

Using the Comparison Grid, you can identify gaps and similarities with other research early on. People can take a quick look at your work and quickly see what your contribution is.

Why is it hard?

Gathering the relevant papers, and building a grid can be a slow painful process. Your work can be in a state of flux initially, new papers appearing, and additional content to relate against. The Comparison Grid can be updated and generated as quickly and easily as you add and modify your work.

Why hasn’t it be solved before?

Mendeley has enabled others to share its research and provided an easy flexible system upon which you can manage your research. With the release of Mendeley API, it’s now possible to create this software to give you the comparison grid.

What are the key components and any specific limitations?

The Comparison Grid’s key components are its simplicity and flexiblity. You can customize it and tailor it to show the necessary results of your work. It’s only limitation is that the current Mendeley API doesn’t allow you to modify document tags or link custom data with documents. Therefore, you have to edit your documents and tag data within Mendeley so that the Comparison Grid can use it. This is a small price to pay though, to produce such a useful tool.

Tomorrow?

Each new revision of the Comparison Grid gains more features and becomes an even more invaluable tool. Even such early revisions have gained lots of interest from collegues, and is currently being used by more and more people. If you have any ideas, please email me and hopefully I can add them in further releases.

Requests

# Choose author or citation format for identifier.

# Auto extract citation count from Google Scholar (and others) and display it on the grid for information.

# Optimise data reading (use multiple threading to read data faster)

Updates

# [08-11-2011] Fix bug, only include documents in selected folders – Thanx Philippe.

# [08-11-2011] Tag names aren’t case sensitive anymore – Thanx Philippe.

# [04-11-2011] Fix bug with folder hierarchy, ordering and include/exclude – Thanx Philippe.

# [04-11-2011] Add a progress bar while reading Mendeley data.

# [04-11-2011] Fix build table crash bug, also default no-folders selected – Thanx Philippe.

# [03-11-2011] Fix maximum abstract size bug (was 4096) – Thanx Philippe.

# More robust

# Sends crash email if it encounters a problem so later revisions are even more stable

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For comments and feedback:

email bkenwright@gmail.com