1. Managing your References and PDFs with Mendeley
Mendeley has some great features that can really help to improve your productivity and save
time. As this tutorial will show, it contains many features that are not available in other
reference managers, like Refworks and Endnote. The downside to this is that most of these
features require installed software, which makes it more difficult to use the system on public
computers. What I love about it personally is that it offers a whole-workflow solution to
doing your literature research. You use it when you first find PDFs, to organize them and
decide which ones to read first. You use it for reading those PDFs, and making notes. You use
it again for producing references in your reports, papers or dissertation. Finally, if your work
is published, you may even use it for promoting your work to other researchers.
Is Mendeley the right tool for you?
Pros Cons
Quick and easy to use Mendeley Web is quite limited.
Desktop software combines PDF This is not very convenient if you
reader and reference manager need to work on your paper
Make notes on PDFs and share from a library computer
them with colleagues Free version limited to 1GB of
Keep PDFs organized across online storage. (~800 PDFs)
multiple computers Currently need Admin to install
Automatically rename 3621a.pdf and update on Staff Desktop.
to Title – Year – Author.pdf Mendeley updates frequently.
OpenOffice and Word plugins for
making bibliographies
Session Outline
1. Getting Started
2. Getting Data In
3. Folders and Groups
4. Changing the Settings
5. Finding your References Again
6. Creating a Bibliography
7. Annotating Files
8. Exporting and Backing-Up
2. Exercise 1 – Getting Started:
Go to www.mendeley.com
Click “sign up” for free
Create a new account. Use a personal e-mail address as this will be available to you after you
leave the university
Download and install Mendeley Desktop for your operating system
Start Mendeley Desktop and sign in with your email and password
Exercise 2 – Getting Data In
Drag-and-drop method
Search for some papers in your subject area in Google Scholar, ScienceDirect etc.
Save the PDFs on your desktop temporarily
Click on “All Documents” in Mendeley and Drag and drop multiple PDFs into Mendeley
Bibliographic details will be automatically extracted from the PDFs
Check the details for accuracy and completeness
If there are missing details (page numbers, issue number) check the title is correct, and click
“Search by Title”. Mendeley will attempt fetch missing details from Google Scholar
3. Add Files / Add Folder
Useful if you have a USB stick or folder on your laptop with 300 PDFs in it, and you don’t want
to drag-and-drop them all
In Mendeley, go to File menu, and click ‘Add Files’ or ‘Add Folder’ and browse to the right
location. If adding a folder, you can choose whether to include subfolders or not.
Add Entry Manually
Useful if you want to add a reference that you have no electronic file for e.g. a book, thesis,
magazine article, web page etc.
In Mendeley, go to the File menu and select “Add entry manually”, then select the type and fill
out as many fields as you wish
Add Entry via Mendeley Web
Useful when you are on a computer where you don’t have Mendeley Desktop installed.
Unfortunately, you can’t add PDFs or other files this way, only references
Go to www.mendeley.com and sign in with your email and password
Click on “My Library”
Click “Add Document”
Select the type and fill in as many details as you wish
Add Entry via Web Importer
From Mendeley Desktop go to Tools > Install Web Importer; or
On Mendeley Web go to My Library > Web Importer
Right Click the “Import to Mendeley” button, and add it to your bookmarks, or drag it to your
browser’s bookmarks toolbar. You may need to enable the bookmark toolbar in your browser
options
Go to a database you’ve used before, or try a new one out. Find a paper. Click “Import to
Mendeley” in your bookmarks toolbar.
If the popup is blocked, click on the warning message and select to alow popups from the site.
Also ensure you are allowing popups from www.mendeley.com
In the popup, you can choose to save a webpage screenshot or add notes
If this worked, you will see the reference in Mendeley Web, and also in Mendeley Desktop. If
you had the access rights, you may also now have the PDF in your library, though sometimes
you will need to add this manually
Exercise 3 – Folders and Groups
4. You have the option to create new Folders or Groups to keep organized. This is useful if you are
working on several projects or subjects that have little or no crossover in terms of references, or if you
wish to use Mendeley to collaborate with people. Folders are for your own organization, while Groups
allow you to share references and papers with a small group of other Mendeley users. If there is any
possibility that you will want to do this, use Groups rather than Folders.
By default you already have the folders “All Documents”, “Recently Added”, “Favourites”, “Needs
Review”, “My Publications” and “Unsorted”.
“All Documents” contains everything in your library
“Recently Added” speaks for itself
You add documents to “Favourites” by clicking the star next to a reference
“Needs Review” is the documents you haven’t read yet. You can mark a document as
read/unread by clicking on the green dot next to a reference (green = unread)
Add documents to “My Publications” by dragging a reference into it, or add it in any of the
ways shown in Exercise 2. You will be asked to confirm that you authored the document.
Documents in “My Publications” will appear on your Mendeley Web profile, with a download
link, unless you select the setting “Unpublished Work – exclude from Mendeley web catalog”.
Be aware of copyright restrictions, but most journals allow authors to self-archive in this way.
There are a few different options for Groups:
Private Groups are visible to members only, and are invite-only. These allow sharing of
references and files among a small group of people
Public Groups are visible to everyone, and can either allow anyone to join, or require them to
be confirmed by the group owner. Great for creating a reading list for a module
Group ownership can later be changed
Exercise 4 – Changing the Settings
5. Mendeley Desktop settings are native to the computer and profile you are using it on. So you may
have different settings on different computers
To Synchronise or Not To Synchronise?
Select “All Documents” or your own Group/Folder and click “Edit Settings”
You can choose whether to “Synchronise Attached Files” for your entire Library or for
individual Folders/Groups. What this means is that Mendeley Desktop will automatically
download new files that have appeared in your online storage – either because:
o You added them through Mendeley Web
o You added them using Mendeley Desktop from another computer
o Another member added documents to a group that you belong to
If you prefer, you can download each file as you need it, by double clicking a reference
For example: on my office computer, I synchronise attached files, because I refer to them
often. On my laptop, which is old and has a small hard drive, I don’t synchronise attached files
File Organiser
Mendeley is also a File Organiser – you can choose a location to store your PDFs, and let
Mendeley do the tedious organizing for you
To do this, go to Tools > Options and select the File Organizer tab
If you wish, it can also organize them into subfolders by Year, Title, Author and Journal in any
order. I don’t bother doing this, because now I only look for my PDFs from Mendeley
It can rename your files automatically using any combination of Title, year, Author and Journal
with different separation options. This is nice when you come to email some files to somebody
By the way, did I mention that you can email files to people without leaving Mendeley? Simply
select multiple references using shift+click or ctrl+click; right click on one of the references and
click “Send by email”. Select some of your Mendeley contacts or enter email addresses, to send
a download link for each file, which will stay active for a couple of weeks.
6. Other Settings
From Tools > Options, you can also add “Watched Folders” if you wish. This will import any
documents that are saved to a particular directory on your computer. For example, you could
add a Dropbox folder, or a folder where you always save new journal PDFs
Also in Tools > Options, you can customise the Document Detail fields for each type of
document. The default settings are usually fine
If you use LaTeX, you can synchronise a Folder/Group or each document with a BibTeX file
7. Exercise 5 – Finding your References Again
If you already have your own large collection of PDFs, that you’ve been keeping on USB sticks, folders
and subfolders; with enigmatic filenames, you can breathe a sigh of relief. You can churn this lot
through Mendeley in minutes. The resulting metadata isn’t going to be perfect, but you are going to
be instantly a lot more organized. You can help yourself by adding important references to Favourites.
If you have a large collection, there are some features in Mendeley to help you narrow down your
search.
Filtering
In the bottom left panel, you have the option to Filter by: Author, Publication, My Tags, Authors
Keywords. Of course, if you want to use “My Tags” you have to add Tags to your references.
For example, if you select a particular author, you will only see documents that have that person
listed as an author. You can actually use this to improve the metadata of your collection while you are
looking for a paper. If you see multiple names that are clearly the same person (e.g. Runyan, R B;
Runyan, Raymond; and Runyan, Raymond B) you can drag the less specific names onto the more
specific one, to rename all instances of the less specific name. This is useful because some citation
styles use full names, while others only use initials for first names, so it’s always better to have more
complete information. You can also do the same thing for publications.
Remember, if you want to switch the filter off, you need to go to the top of the list, and select “All”, or
click “Clear”.
8. Ordering
There are categories listed across the top of the References panel, and you can use these to order
references in ascending or descending order by clicking on the category title. For example, you can see
the files in the order they were added by clicking on “Added”.
Searching
By clicking on the search icon in the search field, you can choose to search only particular fields. You
could also type for example, Author:Hunter OR Nickerson
You can combine Filtering, Ordering and Searching in any order that you wish, to drill down to exactly
the documents you want to find. It can also help you to re-discover related documents that you never
knew you had.
One quirk of Mendeley is that you use the same search field to search within a file when you have it
open. This will just search through the text of that PDF you are looking at, and highlight the words you
are searching.
9. Exercise 6 – Creating a Bibliography
The Copy-and-Paste Way
The trick here is that you can change citation style from within Mendeley desktop. It will allow
you to copy and paste them as text, and they will be in the style you have chosen.
Go to View > Citation Style and choose a popular style. You can also select More Styles to add
more options. If you still can’t find what you want, you could even find a CSL file for the style
online, and copy it into your Mendeley Desktop citation styles directory
Select one reference, or multiple references using ctrl+click or shift+click. Right click and “Copy
Citation”. Then paste it in your word processor, and edit as needed.
This is a good method if you are editing a template, so can’t use the plugin.
The Plugin Way
There are plugins for Microsoft Word, Mac Word and OpenOffice. Here the process is
illustrated for Microsoft Word.
From Mendeley Desktop go to Tools > Install MS Word Plugin, and install the plugin.
Open MS Word and go to the References Tab; you should see the Mendeley plugin
You can select a style from the dropdown menu
Click on “Insert Citation” in the Mendeley plugin
You can search your collection from within Word, or you can go back to Mendeley to find the
reference you want and then send it to Word
When you have inserted some citations, click “Insert Bibliography” in the Mendeley
plugin, at the bottom of your document. You can also export as an OpenOffice compatible
file, or as a Word File with the Mendeley fields changed to normal text.
10. Exercise 7 – Annotating Files
Mendeley offers tabbed browsing for reading several PDF files at once. It will also remember
what page you were on the last time you closed a file, and open it up in the same place.
There are some straightforward options for Annotating files, such as adding “Sticky Notes” or
highlighting text. There is a highlight rectangle option for files where the text hasn’t been
properly recognized.
In the righthand panel, you can select between reference Details and Notes, and sticky notes
will also appear in order here. You can also write some notes for the whole document.
If you use a Private Group to share files with your colleagues, you will be able to see each
other’s annotations, which will appear in a different colour.
Exercise 8 – Exporting and Backing-Up
There are a range of options to ensure that the effort you put into creating a Mendeley Library
will be available to you if you want to switch to a different tool or way of working
Under Help you can create a Backup ZIP file of your whole collection
Under File you can export a particular PDF with its annotations on it
You can also export a range of formats used by other tools, such as RIS used by Refworks, or
Endnote XML, and also BibTeX
Export the whole collection, or just select a few references