Mendeley
Mendeley is a platform for researchers to organize, collaborate, and discover research. It is essentially a reference management tool combined with
an online social network that allows it to be a
collaboration and discovery platform for researchers. The social network is a searchable database of
over 570 million crowd-sourced documents, with
real-time usage data and over 2.6 million users.
It includes over 220 million research groups and
personalized content recommendations.
Instructions for how to set
up a profile
1. Go to www.mendeley.com
2.‘Sign up & Download’ at the top of the screen,
then follow the steps to create your account
3.Under ‘My Account’ click ‘Edit my Profile’. Under
‘Mendeley Web’, you can add a picture, awards
and grants, biographical information, professional
experience, education and other information.
Your profile has been created!
Index your publications
•In Mendeley Desktop, you can index your own publications to our open catalogue to get your work
noticed by the community. Simply highlight the publications that you have authored yourself and drag
and drop them into the ‘My Publications Folder’
•Now click ‘Sync’ on your Desktop and check your completed profile on the Web
•In addition to biographical information, Mendeley also provides readership statistics over time by
showing the number of page views, readers and downloads by Mendeley users
•Scrolling down the page displays your contacts and groups. Completing your profile helps Mendeley
match you to relevant research and colleagues
•If you have a premium account, Mendeley will display on your dashboard personal recommendations
to read, based on the contents of your library
Use as reference management tool: Set up and organize your library
•After you download the Mendeley software you will be guided through some steps to setup your
Library. Mendeley desktop is the software that you download for free, that is stored on your local
computer. Once you have it installed, you can see the Desktop features, for example, if you select a
document from one of the sections, that document’s details (or metadata), such as title and abstract,
etc, are displayed. You can also edit any of these details and add tags or keywords
Elsevier - Social Media Guide
for Mendeley
•By adding files directly from your computer, importing external libraries (from BibTeX, RIS or EndNote
XML), or the Web Importer, you can set up your own library of scholarly articles and other academic
resources. You can full-text search, read, tag, and annotate your papers and create citations using different
citation styles.
Collaborate with colleagues or create public reading lists
•Set up a group in Mendeley and add relevant sources by dragging & dropping on Mendeley Desktop, or
by checking the document and ‘Add document to’ the group. Group members will have synchronized
access to the files and will be able to search, tag, edit, and annotate them in Mendeley Desktop. Your
personal Mendeley newsfeed will then show you relevant updates from your groups and contacts.
•You can set up three different kinds of groups: Private groups that allow you to share full text documents (not searchable in the Mendeley web group catalog), public groups you can only share references
with others (useful for lab groups or creating reading lists with colleagues) and public open groups which
are available for anyone on the Mendeley network to join and thus contribute to. They are great for
encouraging interdisciplinary connections as well as curating special interest groups.
•You can also set up reading lists of references quickly and easily and let others subscribe to them, and
you can even embed parts of your library in other websites (e.g., at your university).
Stay close to relevant research in your field
•Set up a professional research profile on Mendeley Web to share your latest publications and awards.
•In Mendeley Desktop, drag and drop the publications you have authored into the collection
‘My Publications’ and they will automatically show up on your Mendeley Web profile. You can check out
readership statistics about papers, authors, and research topics, and will soon be able to see how often
are your papers downloaded, as well as the number of readers, the geographic location of the readers,
and even their academic disciplines.
•Create your personal bibliographic database using Mendeley’s automatic extraction of document details
(author, title, journal, keywords, etc.) from PDFs, as well as automatic retrieval of additional information
from CrossRef, PubMed, ArXiv, etc.
•Use the integrated PDF viewer to read, annotate, and highlight your PDF research papers.
•Synchronize your bibliographic database across multiple networks, share it with colleagues, manage it
online, or embed bibliographies on blogs and websites.
•Quickly cite your papers in Microsoft Word or LibreOffice Writer and create bibliographies.
•Capture references from websites using Mendeley’s cross-browser Web Importer or via synchronization
with Zotero.
Elsevier - Social Media Guide for Mendeley
Tips and tricks
How to incorporate documents You can use the file menu in the top left corner of your
library. Choosing these will allow you to browse your computer for any files and/or entire folders that
you want to add. You can also simply drag and drop a single file or multiple files into the center area of
Mendeley Desktop, or set up a watch folder which will automatically import PDF files.
•When you add documents into Mendeley Desktop, it will try to extract document details and pull in
details such as the author, title, journal, abstracts, etc. automatically - which saves you the time in having
to add such details manually. If you happen to already have an existing library of references we also offer
integration options for getting those documents into your library as well, either by import of common
reference formats such as EndnoteXML or BibTeX or RIS, or by directly syncing with the application.
Incorporate your EndNote library Save your EndNote library as an .xml file and
import it into Mendeley. You can also choose to directly sync your Zotero account to your Mendeley
library and Mendeley will pull in all the information you have previously collected.
Build your library
•Through the dual platform, you can build your library from either your Desktop or Web account. Sync
your documents to be able to access your library from anywhere you can access your web account.
•Use the editing tools in the PDF viewer to mark-up your research papers. You can make highlights, keep
notes and also make comments. This is a great feature both for your individual collections to keep all
your notes in one place.
Elsevier - Social Media Guide for Mendeley