This is long overdue post and I’m sorry for the delay. I have wanted to make this screen-cast long ago but never had the time and right environment to do it. It was not in perfect environment still as you can hear some background noise in this video. Please bear with me for my first time doing this.
Since I have found Mendeley, I have wanted to show you how I organize my articles collection online. So far so good, I’m still a happy user of Mendeley and I hope to continue use it even after I finish my dissertation.
Organizing articles collection using Mendeley Desktop from Jennifer Lim on Vimeo.
I have been religiously making notes while reading the articles in Mendeley Desktop and later transferred those notes to what I called a synthesis matrix, so I have better idea which author is saying what idea. I haven’t synthesize every article yet as I keep finding new related article here and there. And since I have different categories that I want to explore, it probably takes me more time to go through as much as possible.
Anyway, I’m just glad I found Mendeley to help organizing all the articles, or else it would take me years to get them organized and start writing. Hehe! Hope this tool helps whoever in need. Oh, and if you have better way to do this, do share. Thanks!
Jenn's Studious Life 
Cool! Thanks for this video. It’s a nice intro to Mendeley but I especially love how you put your notes into a matrix. I think I mentioned before that I don’t do that (because I’m lazy) but I can see that it will be very effective so I will have to give it a try.
Great video 🙂
Hi Ben,
Thanks! I remember you said you didn’t use the matrix. Since I have been listening to quite a few lecturers talking about that, so I googled it and found some samples which I try to build upon. Maybe I should talk about it next and you can see if it’s useful to you too. I’m still very new in doing LR, so I think I cannot be ‘lazy’. Hehe!
Thank you Jenn for sharing your apporach. I am an MA student in Sem 2 just about to kick off my dissertation project. I found that I have been doing some of the note-taking or paper management like you have done but have not come up with a system like yours to put everything together. I like how your notes flow from the PDF reader to the matrix and later into your writing.
I am currently working on building my reading list and am struggling with choosing and screening the right papers for my LR. How will you approach it? Love to hear your thoughts.