RefWorks, Zotero, Mendeley: Mendeley

is a free reference manager tool that enables you to manage citations and PDFs using a desktop client or through your account on mendeley.com. Mendeley also includes plugins for Word or OpenOffice, so you can easily create citations and/or bibliographies as you write your papers.

What makes Mendeley unique is that it enables you to leverage the power of social networking to create a global citation management network. Use Mendeley to connect with other researchers in your field and discover what they are reading. There are also groups you can join that focus on particular subject areas or research projects. Mendeley even allows you to log in using your Facebook account.

With Mendeley, you can:

• Create and manage citations of books, articles, videos, and more
• Import citations for databases and the Rhodes Library OPAC
• Automatic metadata extraction from imported PDFs
• Collaborate with other researchers online
• Find relevant papers based on what you’re reading
• Highlight and annotate papers and share those notes with others
• Organize using groups, tags, and filters
• Automatically generate bibliographie
• Easily import papers from other research software
• Access your papers from anywhere online
• Access papers on your Mobile Device using apps

Setting up Mendeley is free and comes with 2 GB of storage on their web server. For an additional monthly fee you can get more storage space. Learn more about pricing & storage.

Tutorials to get you started with Mendeley

What you need

On iPhone / iPad (free!)

Download the iPhone and iPad app to access and view your library on the go - in lectures, classes and in the lab.

Download from the App Store now.

1. Select the book you need cited on the Library OPAC. A Pdf icon appears top right in the tool bar

Click on the Pdf icon.  "Save as" in your document folder and allocate a suitable name.

2. Open Mendeley 'My Library' Select Add Files

Select the file saved in your documents.

3. Change the bibliographic details so that you can identify the book. Allocate the book to the appropriate folder.

  Select the article (individually) to be cited into Mendeley, and open it to the abstract page.

  Select Save to Mendley (in the tool bar). Once the Web Importer has open, choose the file to send the article. Save. If you have to create a new folder, save the citations and drag to the new folder when created

  
   Select the article (individually) to be cited into Mendeley, and open it to the abstract page using article summary

   Select Save to Mendley (in the tool bar). Once the Web Importer has open, choose the file to send the article. Save. If you have to create a new folder, save the citations and drag to the new folder when created

   Select the article (individually) to be cited into Mendeley, and open the PDF article. s to be cited into Mendeley.  Click Adobe icon (top right corner) Convert current web page to an Adobe PDF file, and save to your documents.

Open Mendeley 'My Library' Select Add Files. Select the file saved in your documents. Change the bibliographic details so that you can identify the article. Allocate the article to the appropriate folder.

NOTE: The same export principles apply to other databases.

Select the article (individually) to be cited into Mendeley, and open the PDF.

Select Save to Mendley (in the tool bar). Once the Web Importer has open, choose the file to send the article. Save. If you have to create a new folder, save the citations and drag to the new folder when created

Writing a paper, review or grant proposal

1. Compile your bibliography	2. Organize your references	3. Cite and write
Search our open catalog of 30M+ papers, import references from other online databases and add files from your hard drive.	Create sub-folders and tags for different projects that you are working on.	Mendeley has plug-ins for Word, OpenOffice and BibTeX. We cover thousands of citation styles and you can even create your own.

Unfortunately importing information directly from Barton is not supported at this time.

To add a citation to Mendeley from Barton, use the dropdown arrow on the "Add Documents" button and select "Add Entry Manually...".

Note: You can use this method to manually enter any item you want.

There are a number of ways to add items to your Zotero

It's easy to attach files (like PDFs) to items in your Zotero library.  Just drag the file into your Zotero pane.  Dropping a file onto a collection, or in between library items, will copy it into your library as a standalone item.  Dropping it onto an existing item will attach it to that item.  This is the easiest way to attach a copy of an article to its entry in your library.

Each item also has an Attachments tab in the right column.  You can attach files by clicking the Attachments tab and then the Add button.

You can add PDFs to Mendeley Desktop in two ways:

1. Use the 'Add Document' button located in the Mendeley Desktop toolbar:

2. Drag and drop PDFs into the middle column of Mendeley Desktop

In either case, Mendeley detects the document details (author, abstract, keywords, etc.). Documents that Mendeley cannot find details for go into the 'Needs Review' section for manual verification.

1. Open a PDF in Mendeley's PDF viewer by double clicking on it in the central pane.
2. Add highlights and notes by clicking on the Highlight or Note buttons on the menu.

Searching your collection

You can keyword search your entire Mendeley collection, or a specific folder within it. On the left of your Mendeley Desktop software, select either 'All Documents' or the specific folder you want to search.

The search box is in the top left corner of the screen. By default, Mendeley searches your citations as well as the full articles, but by clicking on the magnifying glass you can focus your search to one of a few specific fields.

Marking up PDFs within Mendeley

This Mendeley LibGuide by Will Meredith is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 United States License.

My Library is located in the left column

Clicking the button above the left column creates a new collection (a folder created and titled for your easy reference)

Organising your research citations

Use these screencasts to understand how to manage your research citations:

Collections: Folders and sub-folders

Tags: Add searchable keywords, status, anything useful to you

Tag selector box

Using notes effectively: Add fully searchable notes, quotes, etc.

Sorting Items: Display by date, author, title or other criteria in records.

Basic Search for items in My Library

Advanced Research

Zotero Screencasts

Highlighting and Annotation

Using a Timeline

1.  To organize your references, use folders. Click on Create Folder… to create a new folder, give it a name, and hit Return.

2.   Drag references from the center column on to the Folder to add them.

File Organiser:

Mendeley's file organizer can automatically rename your PDFs and file them in a clear folder structure, making it easier to find your files outside of Mendeley.  Open Mendeley's File Organizer which can be found under Tools > Options.

In the tab, you can select:

1. Organize my files: to make a copy of all documents added to Mendeley within one folder
2. Sort files into subfolders: to create a folder structure based on selected document details
3. Rename document files: to rename the often non-descriptive names of your PDFs to file names that are more meaningful, including the author, journal, year, and title

Synching your collection

You can synchronize your Mendeley collection across computers, devices, and the cloud-based back up.

When you are in Mendeley desktop, click on the 'sync' button in the Mendeley toolbar.

Organizing citations

By right clicking on specific citations in your Mendeley collection, you can apply pre-set labels displayed below. You can also share, export or delete specific items.

reating folders

Zotero offers word processing plugins for Word and OpenOffice.

Once installed, the plugin adds a Zotero toolbar to your word processor which allows you to add citations to your document while your write up your research.

To add a citation, click the first button ("Insert Citation") on the toolbar. Search for the reference you want to cite and press Enter. Zotero will add the citation at your cursor.

At the end of your paper, click the third button ("Insert Bibliography"). Your bibliography will appear, and new citations will be added automatically. Change bibliographic styles with the last button on the toolbar ("Set Doc Prefs").

Once you have your documents in Mendeley, you can cite and reference them within Word and OpenOffice by installing plug-ins.  Once installed, you will have tool bar buttons that will allow you to cite a document, generate a bibliography, or manually edit any entry.

Go to Tools > Install... and select the plugin you wish to add. 

• When creating a paper, click on Insert Citation in the toolbar to cite a document from your Mendeley Library.

• If you are using Word on Windows, a box will appear allowing you to search for references by author, title or year (note that this is only available for Microsoft Word for Windows at the moment; for Word on Mac or OpenOffice, skip ahead to the second-to-last step).

• When you find the reference you want to cite, click OK and you're done.  You can cite multiple references by using semicolons to separate them.
• If you prefer to find references using Mendeley Desktop, press the "Go to Mendeley" button beneath the search box, which brings up Mendeley Desktop.  Then select the document in Mendeley Desktop, and click Send Citation to MS Word (or OpenOffice). Again, you can cite multiple documents.  Just hold the Ctrl key and left click the documents you want to cite. 

• Your citation will be sent to your word processor.  You can select your preferred citation style in the drop down menu in your word processor.  
• Now you can generate a bibliography by clicking Insert Bibliography.

Quick cite

For quick citations in most text editors, including Google Docs, select the paper you want to cite in Mendeley Desktop and click:  Edit > Copy Citation.  Then, paste it into the document you are composing.

Alternatively, you can drag and drop the paper from the Mendeley Desktop window to the document, and a reference in the current selected citation style will be added there.

Cite while you write

You can insert citations from your Mendeley account directly into your paper as you write. When your paper is done, Mendeley can auto-generate your bibliography.

To insert citations into your paper you must first have the the Microsoft Word plug-in installed. Make sure it is set to use the citation style you want to use. When you are ready to insert a citation,click on 'References' within MS Word and then 'Insert Citation'.

You will be prompted to log into your Mendeley account. You will then be presented with a search box to find the citation within your Mendeley account.

Type a keyword from the citation, such as the author's name or a word from the article title

Click OK

The citation appears within your paper.

Mendeley generates the bibliography

• To have Mendeley generate the bibliography for your finished paper, you must first insert all your citations as explained in the left hand column of this page.
• Place your cursor at the end of your paper.
• Make sure you have selected the citation style you want (see the 'Style:' menu in the screen shot below.)
• Click on 'Insert Bibliography' in the 'References' portion of your Word software.

• It really is that simple.

Simple bibliography

• To make a quick bibliography of citations selected straight from your Mendeley acccount, open your Mendeley Desktop software and Microsoft Word.
• In the Mendeley software click on the citation(s) you want in the reference list (using the Ctrl key to select more than one).
• Drag the citation(s) into your Word software.

• Be amazed at how easy that was.

Creative Commons

This Mendeley LibGuide by Will Meredith is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 United States License.

Creating a bibliography using Zotero is very simple.  There are a two methods available to create bibliography in a specific style, without any in-text citations.

1. Create a Bibliography from selected items

2. Create a Quick copy from selected items

Using Zotero to create in-text Citations and Bibliographies in Word documents

List of Mendeley citation styles

Zotero comes with the most common bibliographic styles, but you can add many more.

To install a style (Firefox):

1. Go to the Zotero Style Repository page in Firefox.
2. Search for the name of the style you need.
3. Click the Install link next to the style, then the Install button to confirm.

The new style will appear in Zotero's style lists.

More information about styles.

Citing your sources.

Zotero's Groups feature allows you to share references with other Zotero users online.

Make sure you have registered your Zotero account, and synchronised your library.

To create a shared library: click the Create Groups button (top left of your Zotero window)

Log in to the zotero.org website to create or join a group.

To join an existing Zotero library, search for it at zotero.org/groups or be invited by the group’s owner.

You now have two sections in your Zotero collections pane: My Library and Group Libraries.

Personal and group libraries are entirely separate, and changes made to items in one library do not affect the other. You can drag items back and forth libraries to copy items.

Zotero's Video Introduction to Groups.

Mendeley

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.  In general, you will want to create Private groups.

Addi\ng members and documents to grouos

Once you have created your group, you can add members and documents to it.

1. To Invite Members to the group go to the Members tab.  You can either add people that are already your contacts on Mendeley by clicking on "Add" or you can invite people to join you on Mendeley by clicking on "Invite".  
2. You can view the documents of a group by going to the Documents tab.  To Add Documents, go to the group and click on "Add documents" in the top bar, or you can simply drag and drop them to the group.
3. To download the PDFs that other group members attach to a group, go to "Edit Settings" and tick "Download attached files to group."  Note:  attached PDF files can only be shared in Private Groups, not in Public Groups.
4. To upload your group wth all its settings to Mendeley Web, hit the "Sync Library" button.

Using grouyps

The overview tab shows a summary of what has happened in your Group.  You can see updates on who has joined, who said what, and which papers have been added by whom.

You can also post status updates by entering your update into the box at the top of the overview section.

Additionally, you can post comments and discuss your research.  Just click on "comment" and start a discussion on any given topic.

Create your Mendeley profile

You  can create your own academic profile in Mendeley, available from the right side of the Mendeley website, so visitors know your credentials.

Link your Mendeley profile on other webpages

Once you have created your Mendeley profile, you can build a widget to display your profile, or just pieces of it, in other webpages.

Creating groups

You can create or join groups within Mendeley, and collaborate on writing a paper. If you use Mendeley to write a team paper without citing sources from your group account, Mendeley will not be able to create a workable bibliography.

Click on the 'Create folder' on the right hand side of the screen

Choose how public you want your group to be.

You can search Mendeley as a atabase as well.

Log into the Mendeley website and you can choose to keyword search for research topics, people or Mendeley groups. You can either use the tabs, highlighted with arrows below, or you can use the dropdown menu as it is displayed below.

Other browsers

What is BibTeX?

BibTex is a bibliographic tool that is used with LaTeX to help organize the user's references and create a bibliography.  A BibTex user creates a bibliography file that is separate from the LaTeX source file, wth a file extension of .bib.  Each reference in the bibliography file is formatted with a certain structure and is given a "key" by which the author can refer to it in the source file. For more information on BibTeX, see MIT IS&T's page: How do I Create Bibliographies in LaTeX.

How do I export from Mendeley to BibTeX?

Open Mendeley, and within "My Library" found on the left, select references that you would like to export to BibTeX. In the drop-down menu in the toolbar at the top of the screen, click "File --> Export" (or ctrl-E if you use keyboard shortcuts) and in the dropdown list of filetypes, chose "Save as type: BibTeX" and save to the same location as the LaTeX file.

If you're working with Mendeley on a PC and your manuscript is on Athena, you'll need to save the BibTeX export to your hard drive and use FTP or another file transfer method to transfer the file to the correct directory in your Athena space.

To link the bibliography file that you just downloaded to your document, you need to enter two commands:

\bibliographystyle{style} should go just inside your \begin{document} command. style.bst is the name of the style file dictating the format of your bibliography (see How do I change the format of the bibliography? below).

\bibliography{filename} should go wherever you want LaTeX to generate the bibliography. filename.bib is the name of the file that you just downloaded from RefWorks containing your exported references.

How do I cite references in my document?

Insert the command \cite{firstauthor _yyyy} where “firstauthor” is the first author’s last name and "yyyy" is the four-digit year. To check that you have the correct citation key for a certain reference, you can look at the .bib file using a text editor.

If you do not have any data in the Label field in Mendeley (or if the data in the Label field is not unique for all of your references, which Mendeley may not have done automatically), you have two options:

Use a text editor to insert or modify a citation key for each reference in the bibliography file that you exported. Simply enter a unique citation key just inside the opening bracket of each reference in your .bib file. An example of a reference entry where the citation key is "angell:GRL" is:

 

How can I correct errors I encounter when running BibTeX on my bibliography file?

BibTeX has a 5000 character limit for each field. Most fields will not surpass this limit, but for a reference where the "note" field contains a large amount of information such as the entire table of contents, this limit may be breached. When this problem occurs, you will see an error message saying "Sorry--you've exceeded BibTeX's buffer size 5000." When you encounter this problem, use a text editor to open your bibliography file and shorten the field that contains too many characters.

How can I correct errors I encounter when running LaTeX on my document after compiling the bibliography file?

If the references in your bibliography file contain certain special characters which are used as part of the syntax of LaTeX, you could see a whole host of errors when you run LaTeX on your document after running BibTeX. For example, LaTeX will view any ampersand in a journal title as an alignment character, and you will see an error message saying "Misplaced alignment tab character &." Use a text editor tofind the line that is causing the error (LaTeX should tell you as part of its error message) and replace the trouble-making character with the following commands:

If you receive a warning from LaTeX that references may have changed, simply run LaTeX again. In fact, the correct order for running LaTeX and BibTeX, where document is your document name, is:

latex document
bibtex document
latex document
latex document

This process should correctly create your bibliography and in-text citations for your document.

How can I make an organization name display correctly?

BibTeX reads text in the author field as an author's name or names unless told otherwise. For example, say a reference exported from Mendeley contains the line:

author={Institute of Electrical Engineers},

BibTeX will read this field as a person's name, where the first name is "Institute" and the last name is "of Electrical Engineers," and would format accordingly. Use a text editor and to add quotes around the field so that the line reads:

author="{Institute of Electrical Engineers}",

Now BibTeX will read this all as one piece rather than as a person's name, and will format correctly.

How can I override BibTeX capitalization conventions?

BibTeX attempts to correct the capitalization in the title field such that only the first letter of the first word is capitalized. While this is generally gramatically correct, it can cause problems if the title contains a proper name or an acronym, so that a line in the bibliography file that looks like this:

title={IEE Proceedings},

will appear in the bibliography as "Iee proceedings." Use a text editor and to add quotes around the field so that the line reads:

title="{IEE Proceedings}",

The quotes will prevent BibTeX from applying its capitalization rules to the title of the document and thus will preserve the capitalization for proper nouns.

How do I change the format of the bibliography?

The bibliography format is determined by the style file that you have entered in the \bibliographystyle{} command. Several default styles exist, they are explained in the section of IST's Latex Answers page entitled How to make Bibliographies in LaTeX. Style files may also be edited to produce a required bibliography style.

Where can I look for additional support?

• LaTeX on Athena Basics
• Emacs on Athena

mendeley desktop

• Automatic extraction of document details (authors, title, journal, etc.) from academic papers into a library database, which saves you a lot of manual typing!  As more people use Mendeley, the quality of the data extraction improves.
• Super-efficient management of your papers.  "Live" full-text search across all your papers - the results start to appear as you type!  Mendeley Desktop also lets you filter your library by authors, journals, or keywords.  You can also use document collections, notes and tags to organize your knowledge, and export the document details in different citation styles.
• Sharing and synchronisation of your library (or parts of it) with selected colleagues.  This is perfect for jointly managing all the papers in your lab!
• More great features:  A plug-in for citing your articles in Microsoft Word, OCR (image-to-text conversion so you can full-text search all your scanned PDFs)

mendeley web

• An online back-up of your library:  Store your documents in your account and access them from anywhere through your browser.
• Detailed statistics of all things interesting:  You can upload your own publications to your reserach profiles, then track the evolution of your readership.  How often are your papers downloaded or read?  From which academic disciplines and geographic regions?  Additionally, there are detailed statistics for each academic discipline and research topic.  Who are the up-and-coming authors in your discipline?  What are the most widely read papers on a specific subject?
• A research network that allows you to keep track of your colleagues' publications, conference participations, awards, etc., and helps you discover people with research interests similar to yours.

FAQs at mendeley

These database publishers are currently supported by Mendeley:

http://libguides.mit.edu/mendeley

mendeley resource centre

elsevier/mendeley connect

mendeley home page

brown university

Stuff to add to Zotero?

Zotero

Zotero is a (free) Firefox extension that helps manage documents found online through the browser. It collects metadata (including citation information) and stores PDFs, files, images, links, and whole web pages for easier retrieval. Zotero can store a "snapshot" of a document, which may actually be the PDF of the document. Zotero is also available in a stand-alone (downloadable) version. Those using multiple computers may also sync their Zotero database between computers and may share citations within a work group.

• Free Firefox extension that helps manage citations found online through the browser
• Automatically capture citation information from web pages
• Import citations from other citation managers
• Store PDFs, files, images, links, and whole web pages for easy retrieval
• Zotero is bound to the installation of Firefox on your computer, but you can install it on a portable version of Firefox on a USB drive to allow for traveling with your Zotero library
• Create bibliographies in Word and OpenOffice
• Zotero has a relatively fewer citation output formats compared to RefWorks or EndNote

» Getting Started with Zotero (UCB Library)
» Introduction to Zotero (PDF; UCB Environmental Design Library)
» Zotero Quick Start Guide
» Zotero Support: Numerous help topics, basic and advanced.

handouts:

For a one-on-one consultation, email your librarian