Academia 2.0

The eventual chaos of an overflowing desk and the lugging around of a ton of books and papers in the library is the bane of every student doing a research article, dissertation or thesis.

Cue Mendeley.com.

Mendeley.com is a research tool which every researcher of any kind can not do without in the Web 2.0 world. What Last.fm has done for music, Mendeley is doing for academia. What the tool does is create a searchable database for your research along with a bibliography-generating tool and it doesn’t stop there, just like Last.fm, it includes collaborative technology which learns more about the topics you are interested in and links you to other researchers in your field as well as highlight any papers which you may have missed in your research.

No more searching through volumes and volumes of journals and making the library your home away from home. Yet, the awesomeness of the tool doesn’t end there. The web interface allows you to pinpoint who the most popular researcher is in any given field at any time. It tracks, in real time, who has cited which article as well as spot trends in any research topic as they happen.

Most importantly the tool is and will remain free. You still have to pay for the articles you want, obviously, but students at university generally have this taken care of by the university itself.

My question is, apart from revolutionising the current sphere of researching, when is the entire process going to be revolutionised? I see a future of video, audio, 3D-modelling and interactive elements being brought to life, research papers which give more detail and applicability to reality. Explanations far beyond the boring black-and-white text which runs for volumes, or in this case, terabytes.

This is what I want to see come to life and with the way technology is changing and revolutionising life itself, I doubt I’ll have to wait long for that to happen.

Tags: Technology, Mendeley, Mendeley.com, Research, Academia, Articles, Thesis, Dissertation