Mendeley: A quick start guide
What is it?
Mendeley is a freemium software that is well-known for managing references. It handles the hassle of academic formatting and documentation storage so the writer can focus on his/her work.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
How to use?
Desktop application (Mac)
To start with, you can upload any documents or add the entry manually:
You can manually insert a web page reference.
Below is the UI of Mendeley:
Area A is a place to edit folders, conduct search and look for authors.
Area B is to display the reference. You can drag and move the bars as well as filtering columns (e.g. Authors, Title, Year).
Area C displays the details of a clicked reference. The details are automatically generated based on internet results and the document itself. You can edit the columns if needed.
Plug-in (Microsoft Word)
After installing the plug-in, you will see the Mendeley in the “Reference” section. The plug-in works the best when you have the desktop version.
Functions from left to right:
“Insert or edit citation”: you can just click and choose the reference you would like to add in that space.
“Merge citations”: this is a super useful function. It can help you to merge different singe citation into a merge citation.
“Insert Bibliography”: One-click to display the list of reference used in that document.
“Open Mendeley”: Open Mendeley desktop version.
“Style”: You can choose a style that will be used in the document. The styles can be upload or personalize in the desktop version.
Remarks:
The latest update of Mendeley has allowed more flexibility on importing *bib, *xml and *ris documents:
In Area C of the UI, it has two new sub-section: “annotations” and “notebook”. The process of reading, note-taking and documentation can, therefore, carry out within Mendeley now.
Take a PDF document as an example. Users can only highlight the content with different colors, add remarks within the document as well as writing in the notebook/ annotations column.
The new “Annotations” column.
The new “Notebook” column.
Finally — is this tool useful if I am NOT a student/ researcher?
Definitely!
Mendeley does not confine users to store academic paper only. There are loads of reference formats available such as a book, audio and webpage etc. You can paste a link or direct the reference to the subsequent folder on your computer.
It is a handy tool to build up a library of knowledge for personal learning.
