Brief guide to Mendeley
Mendeley is a free reference manager and academic social network that can help you organise your work, collaborate with others online and discover the latest research.
Mendeley is available for Mac, Windows and Linux. You can sign up for your Mendeley library via Mendeley.com, and access it through any internet browser by signing into https://www.Mendeley.com
Collect
You will need to install the Web Importer bookmarklet; simply drag and drop the "Save to Mendeley" button into your internet browser toolbar.
The Web Importer allows you to import papers, webpages and other documents into your library from search engines and academic databases.
You can also drag any PDF directly into Mendeley from your desktop or folders, and then annotate, cite and highlight.
To add a reference manually select the “add a new document” icon and from the box that appears enter where you want to add the item and the type of item (book, article, etc.); then enter the bibliographic information for the item.
Click save when you have finished.
Organise
You can arrange the items in your library into folders or groups by simply adding a new folder or group and selecting the items to be transferred.References are arranged alphabetically by title. Although there seems to be no option to change this, you can filter the references by publication title.
Cite
Mendeley’s MS Word and OpenOffice Plug-ins allow users to insert citations directly from their word processing software.Once the plug-in is installed if you open a word document and select the References tab you will see Mendeley Cite-O-Matic; from here you can insert a citation, change the reference style and insert a bibliography.
Mendeley supports all the major referencing styles (APA, Chicago, Harvard, MLA, Vancouver, etc.) as well as numerous other styles which can be added if so desired.
Share
Using the Group option allows you to share and collaborate with your peers; there are three types of group: Private, Invite-only and Open. These types allow you to limit how you share information.
There is also a page of Popular Groups that you can join/view.
Further assistance
More help guides, videos and tutorials on how to use Mendeley can be found at: https://www.mendeley.com/guides
Need more help with referencing? You could come to the library drop-in sessions or contact your Faculty Liaison Librarian.
