Mendeley is a free reference manager and academic social network that allows users to organize research, collaborate online, and discover new research. It indexes PDFs, allows importing documents from other reference managers and research databases, and shares documents and references through private or public groups. Mendeley installs a toolbar in Word or OpenOffice to easily insert citations and generate bibliographies in different styles from within your Mendeley library.

1. Mendeley
Citation Managers: which one for you?
August 2013

2. What is Mendeley
Mendeley is a free reference manager and
academic social network that can help you
organize your research, collaborate with others
online, and discover the latest research.
However, Mendeley was purchased by Elsevier
during 2013. At present the software remains
free to users.

3. Indexing your pdfs with
http://www.mendeley.com/

4. Register and Download

5. Signing in
(N.B. You will be asked to respond to this screen every time you change your LAN password)
Moving to a New Computer
Once you have registered as a Mendeley user
this is easy – download the software and log in
to your existing account

6. Open Mendeley Desktop

8. Mendeley Login
• Click on General
• Fill in your Mendeley login and password
• Click on Apply

9. Creating your library
• You can add PDFs by clicking the Add Files
button on the far left toolbar
• Alternatively, you can drag and drop PDFs into
the content pane
• If you want to have access to your PDFs from
anywhere, activate the file synchronization
feature, and you are able to access your PDF
files in your Mendeley Web Library

10. Adding pdfs

11. Reviewing document details
This is an important task as Mendeley does not always get it right, you want your bibliography
to be perfect, so take the time to review the details of each pdf

12. One-click Web Importer
allows you to import papers, web pages and other documents into your library from search
engines and academic databases.

13. Important citations
http://www.mendeley.com/import

14. Import/export Endnote, Bibtex and Ris
libraries

15. Watch folders
Click on Tools, Options, Watched Folders
Tick the folders you want Mendeley to watch. Any new PDF’s in these
folders will be imported into your library into Mendeley automatically.

16. • When you place a document in a watched
folder, it will automatically be added to
Mendeley
• You will be able to annotate, cite and browse
references instantly
• Using watched folders makes it easier to add
multiple papers in one go and keep them
where you want on your computer

17. Insert citations in your articles
• Install the Word or Open Office plug-in (This will install tool bar
buttons that will allow you to cite a document and generate a bibliography)
• Click Insert Citation within your document
• Select the document in Mendeley Desktop, and click Send
Citation to Word. You can also cite multiple documents. Just
hold the Ctrl key (or the Cmd key on Mac) and left click the
documents you want to cite
• Select the citation style in the drop down menu in your word
processor
• Generate a bibliography by clicking Insert Bibliography

18. Citing a document from within your
library
From the Mendeley citation toolbar you can automatically insert formatted citations or
generate a bibliography for your paper

20. Mendeley Tool Bar

21. Installing additional citation styles
Click on Adding new citation styles to Mendeley Desktop, and then the word “here”
A repository of currently available styles can also be found here.

22. Sharing documents and references
• Groups are a simple way for you to collaborate
with your colleagues and share a collection of
documents.
• Any member of a group may upload
documents to it.
• You can create a group by clicking on “Create
Group” in the left hand pane.

23. How to create a group

25. Types of groups
• Private groups – These are invite-only groups
whose content will only be visible to members
of the group. ( great for private research
projects)
• Public Invite-only Groups - These groups are
visible to anyone, but only members can
contribute to them (great for public reading
lists)

26. • Public Open Groups - These are groups
anyone may join and contribute to. They are
designed for open discussion around any
subject.

27. Invite people to the group

28. Using groups

29. To Summarise
• Automatically generate bibliographies
• Collaborate easily with other researchers online
• Easily import papers from other research
software
• Find relevant papers based on what you’re
reading
• Access your papers from anywhere online
• Read papers on the go, with our new iPhone app

30. • http://feedback.mendeley.com
• support@mendeley.com
Mendeley Support & Help

31. Thank you
Amina.Adam@uct.ac.za