Introduction
In this blog, we are going to see the reference management software called Mendeley. It's a very popular reference manager we will see the same software Zotero in future blogs at Research Needs. So in this blog, we're going to be looking at how to use Mendeley - in particular Mendeley desktop as well as the Mendeley web importer and the Microsoft Word integration.
How to download the Mendeley Software?
To download the Mendeley software you can get that on the Mendeley website that's mendeley.com. Click on the reference management tab in the top left and click the download now button. Mendeley is available for Windows. It's available for Mac. It's available for Linux. So you shouldn't have any problems in terms of compatibility. To download the software you have to sign in first, do it soon, it will help you to connect the Mendeley server and updates. Then just go ahead and download and install it. Alright so once that's installed you'll have a piece of software that looks something like this. Now yours might have a popup message because it's your first time using it and that's fine. You can just close it I'll show you how to do everything from within the software.
So this is your home base, this is Mendeley desktop. The first thing that you want to do is install all the add-ons so to do that you'll go to the Tools menu and you'll say install web importer and install the Microsoft Word plugin. Once those are installed you're ready to go. Okay, so the first thing you've got to do is populate your reference management tool, in this case, Mendeley. Now, this is standard for pretty much any software you're always going to have to populate first before you can go and drop citations into a document.
How to add the article or References in Mendeley?
Thankfully, Mendeley has a few ways to do this and some of them are really easy. So let's take a look at the options.
1) All right, the first option you have in terms of bringing your citations or bringing your literature into Mendeley is quite simply just to drag and drop the PDF files that you have into the interface. You will see that not only it will list, but it's fully populated on this site including the year, the volume, the issue, abstract, etc. So this is really very handy - this can really save you time. There is however a massive limitation and that this only really works for journal articles. So if you're importing anything other than a journal article, if it's a chapter of a textbook or anything other than a journal article, it probably won't be as good. You can certainly give it a try, but it might not have the right information what is really great about dropping a PDF file straight into Mendeley is that it actually goes and saves that you'll see down at the bottom right here it goes and saves it into the software. So not only do you have all your records or all your citations in one place, but you can actually easily access the PDF directly from Mendeley, which is pretty neat.
2) Right, the second way to populate your Mendeley database is to use Mendeley’s built-in literature search functionality. So let's have a look at that. So to use this function you'll just go up to the literature search button up in the top left over here, and then you just basically search for whatever keyword or title of a journal article you're looking for. So just search for something in generic like trust and Mendeley returns a whole lot of options so you'll see that for each of these it has full details. It has the abstract that has all the details of the journal articles so that's really handy provided what you're searching for is a journal article or a well-known piece of work so to import any of these into my database. I'll just go and click the save reference button up top here. I'm going to install a few or import a few just so that we have something to work with at a later stage. Right so then going back to my document library you can see that I now have quite a few options here in terms of the literature that is in my database. So the literature search functionality is really handy.
3) Use of Install Web Importer Tool: When you're searching for a journal article or something that is widely published in academic circles. But if you want to import or if you want to cite a webpage, for example, say a blog post from a reputable source you're not gonna have the record within that literature search database. So what you then do is you use Mendeley's web importer function. So once you've installed the Mendeley web importer you'll see that it has a little icon, or that you have a new little icon in the top right of your browser. It has support for all the major browsers. What you'll then do is while we're on the page, click the little icon button up here and we'll need to sign in to the account and once you signed in you can see, Mendeley is automatically detected that it's a web page and it's populated the title. Now in some cases, it will populate the author name and other information, but for the most part that's really up to you to go and populate this. Once you've done that you can click save and that will automatically feed straight into your Mendeley database.
4) All right, so those are three pretty easy ways to import, or at least to find the right information, but sometimes you're just going to be left to manually insert data into the Mendeley database and let's just have a quick look at how you do that. So in the Mendeley desktop app, you're just gonna right-click in this white area over here and you're gonna say "add the entry manually". The first thing you need to select is the type of resource. So that might be a book section it might be a piece of film it might be an encyclopedia article. You just select what's appropriate and you fill in the data and it will go and populate.
Use of Install MS Word Plugin Tool: Now you've got your Mendeley database nice and populated, you've got all the resources that you want to cite, and the next step is naturally to drop it into a Word document - so let's take a look at how you do that. Once you've installed the Mendeley Microsoft Word add-in, which we did right in the beginning, you'll see that there's a new option in the references tab of your Microsoft Word and you'll see that the biggest button says insert citation - so this is pretty straightforward. But, before you do that, the first thing you need to do is select your style, in other words, Harvard, APA, or whatever your preference is. Or whatever the requirement of the university is. So you'll click the little drop-down over there and you'll usually find most of the popular ones in this drop-down. But if not you can go to more styles and you'll have the option to go and search for more styles. All right, so you've selected the style that you need for - this example let's just choose Elsevier Harvard - and you're going to naturally have two requirements. One is to insert citations and the other is to build a reference list. So to insert citations it's pretty straightforward. You would just write your text as you normally would and then when it comes time to insert the title citation, you just literally click that button up there, search for the relevant citation, and there you go. Let's just do this a few times so that there's something of a list to work with and let's just do one more. Okay, so there we have three options, or rather three references citations that have been put into a document and it's now time to build a reference list. But before we do that, let's just look at how one goes about changing the formatting if you need to. So in this instance, we've gone and we've used a standard citation format where it is first our statement and then just a citation to the author. If you want to give the author a more authoritative voice in your writing, what you can do is quite simply just change the style manually intervening. The moment you do this, Mendeley will ask you if you want to edit and you'll say yes you do. So in this case we're just changing it to Shukla et al and we are parenthesizing the year and then onward.
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