Mendeley is designed as a document manager for academics. It’s not nearly as rich as EF, but it does bibliographies. It seems possible to load documents from EF into Mendeley, while keeping the actual PDFs in EF.
Question: does anyone have experience with this integration? In particular, I’d like to run a script that will import selected documents into Mendeley.
BTW, Mendeley is designed to work with published PDFs and books - things that have a DOI tag or an ISBN that it can look up. For everything else, I’ve been having to enter information manually. Other products in the same general class are Papers and the old (and expensive) EndNote.
I started writing such a script, but I wasn’t able to get it to work. It seems that Mendeley doesn’t support AppleScript, and even telling it to open a file (e.g. by dragging it onto the Dock icon) does not cause it to import the file.
tell application "EagleFiler"
set _records to selected records of browser window 1
repeat with _record in _records
set _file to _record's file
-- Error because Mendeley doesn't support AppleScript
tell application "Mendeley Desktop"
open _file
end tell
-- Doesn't work because telling it to open a file does nothing
set _path to _file's POSIX path
set _script to "open -a 'Mendeley Desktop' " & _path's quoted form
do shell script _script
end repeat
end tell
The same trouble here. I have tried to come up with a workaround to no avail.
I am not familiar with AppleScript but how about this? Send PDFs from EF to one of Mendeley’s “Watched Folders.” In that way Mendeley will import new files to its destination folder. But then there is no collaboration between the two applications.
Maybe you could just set Mendeley to watch EagleFiler’s Files folder? I think it’s able to reference the files in EagleFiler rather than moving them to its own folder.
Oh, that’s right. It would be simpler. I set up a separate folder within EF library in which I put PDF articles necessary for citations/references and then I add the folder to the list of Mendeley’s watched folders.
The only problem is that once Mendeley imports PDFs from EF, it renames the PDF and moves them to its destination folder.
I once tried to make a folder within EF as Mendeley’s destination folder but Mendeley would not deal with duplicates while EF did, causing a mess. It’s a bug in Mendeley, I assume.