Working at a software company, you learn a thing or two about the useful do-dahs out there. But what about the apps that can boost your focus, squash distractions or cut down on the endless march of admin in academe?
There are lots of handy apps for academics out there like PaperCrowd and Google Scholar. When you get the rare chance to block out some precious thinking time, don’t let poor organisation get the better of your productivity. You can always suggest new mobile features, or vote up other people’s suggestions at If you like what you see, please help spread the word by leaving a review in the app store, or tweet with the #MendeleyiOS hashtag.From unsticking your writing to squashing digital distractions, here’s our pick of the 10 best productivity apps for academics out there.
When reading a PDF, you can slide the document details out of your way, and single-tap on the PDF to enable true full-screen reading mode in landscape or portrait orientation. If you’d rather have all your PDFs stored on your device, you can enable this in ‘Settings’. When the PDF has downloaded, a blue “Read” button will display instead.
Simply tap the download arrow on a document to download the PDF. Full-text PDFs aren’t downloaded to the device by default, but we’ve streamlined the UI to let you easily download individual PDFs on demand. These days a lot of reading happens away from the computer screen, so Mendeley for iOS has been designed to give you the best possible reading experience wherever you are, on your iPad or iPhone. You can customise which smart filters are visible by tapping ‘Edit’ at the top of the library overview. This means that recently added documents will also appear on your iPhone or iPad.
The Library overview lists all your folders and groups, as well as the smart filters that you’re used to in Mendeley Desktop, including ‘Favorites’, ‘My Publications’, and ‘Recently Added’. You can also sync the changes you make at any time by tapping the sync button in the bottom left. When you first login to the app, all your references, folders, and groups from Mendeley Desktop will be synced to your device automatically.