In preparation for writing a master thesis we have to write a 3000 word dissertation plan, with at least 8 relevant papers for the literature review. My 4^th your honours project didn't really involve much of a literature review, so the prospect of organising papers and knowing which bits are important is a bit of a daunting task. I spent a long time going through Wikipedia's list of reference managament software hoping to find something useful. Most of them are either not free, for Linux or Mac only or are rather shoddy.  A couple looked promising but ended up just being a sort of address book for PDFs where you had to manually enter in all the data. I was all ready to give up - until I found Mendeley.

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