Mendeley is a PDF-managing program for both Mac OS and Windows that uses web browser plugins and desktop
software to organize, save, and manage any scholarly articles or other PDF documents you need it to.
To start using Mendeley, simply go to www.mendeley.com and sign up for an account. Then you can
download Mendeley Desktop and, if you’d like to, install the browser plugin for increased convenience
while researching.
Add
Once Mendeley is installed and open, you can import any materials you have already by clicking on the
“Add Documents” button at the top of the window.
By clicking on the arrow next to that button, you can also add entire folders of documents, and use a
feature (labeled “Watch Folder”) in which you select a folder, and Mendeley will automatically import
any documents you put into it. Be sure to double check the information Mendeley uses for each article,
though – sometimes it gets things wrong!
Organize
Once you have your documents in Mendeley, you can select multiple documents to put into a single
folder by clicking on the “Create Folder” button at the top of the window and dragging whichever
documents you’d like into said folder.
You can also add tags to article by selecting an article and adding to the ‘tags’ section in the right hand
pane. Tags can help with organization; you can quickly search for all articles containing a particular tag
in the left pane search bar.
Read
Mendeley not only helps to organize your research, but also contains a built-in PDF reader. Using this
reader, you can highlight and add comments to articles as you read.
Cite
Most relevant to the life of a college student is creating citations, and this is an integral function of
Mendeley. There are two ways to cite using Mendeley; first is by copying the citation from Mendeley,
and second is by installing the Word plugin.
First, be sure that you’ll be using the correct citation format by going to the toolbar at the top of the
window and going to View>Citation Style and selecting your preferred style. For information regarding
which style to use, we recommend visiting http://subjectguides.library.american.edu/citation and
finding the style corresponding to your subject.
The next step is creating the actual citation, which is very simple. Just right click on the document you
want to create a citation for and select “Copy Citation”. (If you’re on a MacBook, you can either controlclick or click using two fingers.) The citation is now on your clipboard and can be pasted into any body of
text. The only drawback is that citing a specific page of the document has to be done manually after
pasting the citation.
Word Plugin
Alternatively, you can use Mendeley’s Word plugin. This is very easy to install and use and allows for
simpler insertion of citations. To install it, just go up to “Tools” on the toolbar and click on “Install MS
Word plugin”. If you install the plugin but then decide you don’t want to use it anymore, an option
labeled “Uninstall MS Word plugin” will appear in the same place.
That done, simply go to the References tab at the top of the window and click on “Insert Citation”. This
will bring up a small window prompting you for an author, title, or year of the document you want to
cite. You can use this to search your entire Mendeley library to create your citation. Simply choose the
document you want to cite, click on “Okay” or press Enter, and your citation will be created
automatically. Also, if you want to cite multiple authors in the same citation, you can do this by
searching for and adding each document into a list before clicking “Okay”.
After inserting citations into your Word document, you can then insert a bibliography containing all of
those sources by simply clicking the “Insert Bibliography” button, which is right next to the “Insert
Citation” button.
Before using the Word plugin to create citations in Word 2010, take a look at the Word Citations
handout, provided on the Academic Technology Studio’s web site at
www.cornellcollege.edu/library/ctl/ats/handouts.shtml. These two processes are very similar.
These are just the most basic functions of Mendeley. There are many more things you can do with it,
but we’ll save those for another time.