Pulling up text sections across multiple documents using searches and filters

Came across A.nnotate.com whilst reading the comments here. In A.nnotate.com you can
search and browse the text, tags and notes
any part of the text can be annotated or even regions of an image
In the tools section, you can get an index of all the tags and you can also get a text file with the notes taken.
Unfortunately it is not free so I have only played with the example files and I am not sure my links will work but I thought it could be really good tool to integrate into BHL, GoogleBooks and Mendeley for example as it has the ability to pull up text sections across multiple documents using searches and tags so collaborators can mark-up pdfs and share their tags and notes.

Zotero linked into Mendeley

Downloaded Mendeley 0.9.4 and now you can import all the references from Zotero. I didn't have too many refs in Zotero (844) so it didn't take too long to import them. After a couple of crashes, it now seems to work fine. I couldn't figure out how to import the pdf links unfortunately. I think this might be quite useful, especially as Zotero is so much better at importing the metadata.

No citation plugin for Mac in Mendeley => Using Zotero

Mendeley still doesn't have a Word plugin for making citations. I tried for a while to sort out Endnote X2 with word 2008 and gave up. I followed all the suggestions I could find in the Endnote help and the EndnoteX2 submenu in word still didn't appear.
Zotero to the rescue. I installed Zotero version 2.0b6.5 and and the Mac Plugin for word 2008 and hey presto, it works! It works fine so it will do for now and I might be converted.

labmeeting.com

What a rigmarole to signup to labmeeting.com. I had to send them a link to my webpage and then they asked me to put a link to labmeeting on my webpage and finally they let me sign up. It took 4 days!
If Mendeley took had the same strategy they wouldn't have 22,607 users with 2,723,657 articles. Couldn't find any stats for labmeeting.com
Pdf data extraction was just as bad in Labmeeting as in Mendeley. In labmeeting you can't provide a doi lookup.

Mendeley is getting better day by day.

Unlike some cynics, I think Mendeley is the bees knees! I am currently collaborating on two separate projects and sharing the references thanks to Mendeley couldn't be easier. Now it is even better, with integrated pdf viewer and the ability to highlight and make notes directly on the pdf.
I am sold, I really think it is the best reference manager social networking tool out there.

Mendeley profile and BiomedExperts

Mendeley definitely seem to be on the ball, they have actually bothered to comment on my blog. They also seem to be very open about their future plans and about making certain aspects of their software flexible for use by the users (i.e. formatting of your own citations styles).
What I think would be a cool thing to do, is to use the information from the My Publications to automatically create peoples profiles.
In BiomedExperts, I only needed to select my publications to have a profile generated with keywords that define the organisms, concepts and ideas I work on. It also used my co-authors to create a network of collaborators and addresses from my publications to create a GeoNetwork.
My profile is bare at the moment except for My Publications. It would be nice if it could be self-generating.

Mendeley

I have been doing a bit of a comparison between Mendeley and Papers recently because I haven't used Endnote for a while, actually since my last post on Reference managers. People suggected Zotero and EndnoteWeb to me, but I didn't like either of them.

I must say, I really love Mendeley as a social tool. It is great to be able to share pdfs with collaborators and to be able to access my references as easily at home and at work, especially since I have a PC at home and a mac at work.
Creating collections with all the associated metadata for publications is great. I haven't yet used the word plugin, so I will let you know shortly what I think of that. The down side with Mendeley is that you only have 500Mb of space online at the moment.

Papers is cool too, especially the fact that you don't need to open up a pdf reader as a separate program, you can do Google Scholar, ISI, Pubmed etc searches within Papers and automatically download pdfs if your instituion has access. You can highlight words in the pdf and do searches on those or highlight the doi and get all the associated metadata. Unfortunately, it only works and macs and doesn't have all the social networking aspect that Mendeley has.