In today's world of tablets, smartphones, and other mobile devices a lot of reading and annotating happens away from a computer or laptop. Arguably that means that organising should be available on the move as well. And of course it is. In the case of Mendeley, natively in the Mendeley iOS app for iPad and iPhone, and through third-party apps for both iOS and Android. Zotero doesn't offer its own native apps, but there are third-party apps available for both iOS and Android. You can find an overview of available apps at the bottom of this post.

Feed the donut

One app I want to highlight here, because of its incorporation of altmetrics is PaperShip. Unfortunately, right now it's only available for iOS, but hopefully in the future they'll produce an Android version as well. When you connect PaperShip to your Mendeley or Zotero account, it'll sync your library in the app, allowing you to download any associated pdf's and read and annotate it in the PaperShip app itself. All of this is more or less the same as what the native Mendeley app provides, although PaperShip's annotation options are more extensive than Mendeley's. What PaperShip offers that Mendeley doesn't is the inclusion of altmetrics. If you open up a library in PaperShip, you'll be able to see at a glance which articles have an altmetrics score and how large it is. You can also drill down and see what sort of attention the paper is getting, through the familiar Altmetric.com donut. It's an easy way to see whether an article gains traction and might be a useful way to prioritise your reading.

Organised Discovery

Another very useful app is Browzine. This isn't actually a reference managing app, it's a discovery app, but it is one that can send papers you've found directly to your Mendeley and Zotero accounts and which allows you to browse a large percentage of our library's e-journals quickly and easily. You can browse your favourite journals that you've grouped on your shelf or search our collection for different journals in your field. Once you've found an article that is of interest you can download, save it for later, annotate it, or send it to your preferred reference manager. You can find out more about this app and its features by checking out the library's Browzine page.

App Overview