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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.

Quick Mendeley facts


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    Where is my material saved? Mendeley stores your research material on your computer, but it also backs up your entire account 'in the cloud' which allows you to synch your Mendeley account acrosss more than one computer / tablet / phone.

    Why should I use Mendeley? The program stores your references, figures, and PDFs, which makes retrieving these items easy. Mendeley also works with Microsoft Word and Open Office to enable you to insert in-text citations and generate bibliographies with just a few mouse clicks. The social network feature lets you interact with colleagues on research as well as see what other people in your field worldwide find interesting. 

    What's the catch? No catch, except that there is a bit of a learning curve and the free version of Mendeley limits you to 2GB of storage space.
     
    What is the advantage of using Mendeley? It is secure, synchronised and accessible. No more risk of losing your PDFs and annotations. We provide you with 2GB of free online storage to automatically back up and synchronize your library across desktop, web and mobile
    Which computers should I use to access My Library account? The Library has installed a login to Mendeley which you need to sign on when you use Mendeley in the Library. Install Mendeley desktop on any or all your personal devices.
    How compatible is Mendeley with PCs etc? Mendeley works on any Operating System (Windows, Max and Linux), through any internet browser, and you can download the Apps for iPad and iPhone.

What is 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:

  • collect and organize your references as well as automatically create in-text citations and bibliographies in the citation style of your choice

  • 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. It also has a social network feature in which you can create groups, collaborate and share with colleagues as well as see what other researchers have collected on a topic.
  • 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 bibliographies
  • 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.

To understand how to use Mendeley, please see the attached Mendelay Guidebook.

To access tutorials on how to use the Mendeley reference manager please go to https://www.mendeley.com/guides/desktop 

For tutorials on how to use the word plug in to help you reference please visit https://www.mendeley.com/guides/using-citation-editor

Need help?

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

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