Perfect Dual For Serious Writing Tools: LyX and Mendeley

If you are a LaTeX user. Then you can skip the rest of this section to the use, otherwise, let me try to convince you.

You see, if you are writing academic papers, report, research publications, any strict-format documents, LaTeX is the best tool to give you the right documents. All other word processors focus on both contents and format, while LaTeX only asks you to focus on the content, the format can be done later and precisely. But a downside of LaTeX is the syntax and the structure. It is pure text file with weird commands and directives. The learning curve is rather high for traditional word processor users.

I found this LyX very useful. It is pretty much like a word processor and LyX can incorporate with LaTeX code., although LyX does not claim to be a WYSIWYG tool for LaTeX. LyX uses LaTeX class, style, bibliography-style files which can be added later.

For Bibliography management, LyX uses BibTeX. BibTeX can be generated from any tool. For this particular use, I found Mendeley the best among tools I have tried. Mendeley synced your bibliography with the cloud. Every workstation that you work on with the same user, you will always the identical copy of papers. Although Mendeley limits your storage to 500 MB, but that is plenty and you have an option to upgrade the storage. Mendeley is also a community where you can share your library with your colleagues. Sorry, I gave up EndNote long time ago, it may have improved but I do not bother to check. The pain was too great.

Now you can generate BibTeX library for your paper organized in folders and let LyX uses it to manage citation and reference sections. Whether author or information prominent citations, LyX citation management is very efficient. What more is LyX has tracking feature, which allows co-author editing. What else do you want more?