What a great time to be doing this Thing! I'm starting to deliver my first referencing and plagiarism sessions of this year and am also working on a project to embed digital literacy skills into our induction programme. Online referencing tools seems a perfect meeting of these two things...
Initially I was most drawn to trying out citeulike - as an online tool that doesn't require a download I thought this could be a useful tool to potentially recommend to students (downloading to the network being outlawed for students and staff at my organisation). However, after reading up a bit more on citeulike I realised this probably wasn't going to be the best for referencing functionality (not it's fault, as Isla says, that's not really what it's designed for).
As I don't really use Firefox, by elimination Mendeley then became the referencing tool I tried out. I had a play around by adding some PDFs to Mendeley and had a a mixed success rate - the first one I added it found the reference immediately, the second one it had no idea what it was and the third, it found the correct title but assigned it a completely different journal title... It was pretty easy to amend and add details, but this would require anyone using it to check the details of what they are adding and amend/delete where it was wrong.
Overall, unfortunately I don't think Mendeley is going to be appropriate for the students I teach at the moment It requires a fair amount of leg work (and a download of the software) to get to the stage you can use it for referencing. I think it would be great for larger scale research projects and is definitely something I would keep in mind for this.
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