Many Mendeley users will already be familiar with Labfolder, the digital lab notebook that lets you organize your protocols and data. The good news is that all this functionality is now being integrated into Mendeley to bring scientific literature closer to the lab. This is why we invest so much on our open API, so that 3^rd Party developers can integrate even more functionality right into the Mendeley platform. Here’s Florian Hauer to tell us how that works for Labfolder:

If you work in experimental sciences – biology, medicine, chemistry, physics or any other discipline where you do experiments in the lab – there are several reasons why you read scientific literature. The primary motivation might be to learn what other people did that relates to your research – and how they did it. Second, you want to know which papers describe the basis for your experiments, and you want to cite them correctly. Third, you would like to share useful papers with your colleagues.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have your scientific library right in your lab notebook, where you can search, read and cite all your papers of interest? We thought it would be – and that´s why we integrated Mendeley into Labfolder.

Like Mendeley, Labfolder is a free tool to make research easier, more organised, and more collaborative. Labfolder is a digital lab notebook which allows you to collect all primary research data on a digital platform instead of a paper notebook. With mobile apps for smart phones and tablets, you can collect data and take notes anywhere, and reusable and shareable protocol templates and group functions help you to exchange knowledge and speed up your research.

With this integration, we have made another step towards bringing scientific data from different sources closer together. With the Mendeley extension in Labfolder, you can:

• Cite any publication from your Mendeley library directly in your experimental descriptions to track which literature you need to cite in your final paper
• Download, integrate and view any paper from your Mendeley library in your protocol description to quickly look up details right in the experimental workflow
• Upload your Labfolder experiments to Mendeley to attach them to publications and share them with colleagues.

Watch the video to see how it works

labfolder Mendeley integration from labfolder on Vimeo.

With the integration into Mendeley, it has become a lot easier to link experimental descriptions to scientific publications. Very often, the technical details of how a scientific discovery was achieved is heavily edited and compressed, making it very hard for researchers to extract the necessary information. Linking experimental descriptions and publications, and sharing these links as well as the detailed content will help enormously to bridge this gap.

With its recommendation engine, Mendeley offers a powerful tool to identify interesting content. It provides helpful navigation in the endless sea of data and content – for publications as well as for experimental descriptions – and helps researchers to find the data they need. Thus, Mendeley is an ideal platform for sharing experimental details: You can reach an interested audience and get credit for your research. To protect privacy, however, all Labfolder uploads are private by default and marked in Mendeley as ‘unpublished work’ so nothing will be shared until you are ready for it to be.

Sharing of scientific data is becoming more and more attractive: Apart from the fact that US researchers get credit for shared data in publications, studies have shown that scientists who share their data get cited more often.

We hope you enjoy the new features in Labfolder brought to you by Mendeley! If you have more great ideas about how to improve the use of scientific literature in Labfolder – or Labfolder itself – get in touch and let us know!