Welcome to 5 days of Mendeley
Mendeley is a free tool that can help you store and organise the references that you find during your research. This reference information can then be used to automatically insert citations and a fully formatted reference list into your Word documents. Mendeley also contains a great social media community designed for researchers. However this five days of Mendeley will concentrate on referencing.
As a free tool Swansea University cannot offer technical support for the resource. Any problems with the resource need to be reported directly to Mendeley.
Swansea University subscribe to Endnote, a referencing tool with technical support available.
However due to the high number of enquiries regarding Mendeley the desktop version is available from the unified desktop along with the Word plug-in. This five Days of Mendeley has been created in response to a number of enquiries about the referencing tool and it is not intended as a substitute for Endnote.
Mendeley has fewer citations styles than Endnote and does not, at the moment, include the Vancouver (Swansea) style. It does include APA and standard Vancouver in its referencing library.
Getting Started
Today we will look at creating a Mendeley Account and necessary software installations (if not connected to the unified desktop). The instructions below are to create the Desktop Application and also a Mendeley account. You can use just the online version of Mendeley. However syncing is extremely easy and does give you more control of your references.
- Go to: www.mendeley.com
- Select Download Desktop App and the file will download.
Once downloaded click on Run (it might be hiding on the bottom-left of your screen).
You will then be prompted to register with Mendeley and Elsevier. You maybe able to skip this step if you have already registered with Elsevier or an Elsevier product such as Scopus or ScienceDirect.
Although it is not necessary to add the citation plug-in at this point, you will also be prompted to add the citation plug-in for reference output.
If you wish to complete this step then click on Install now. You can Talways install this at a later date. It can be found under Tools.
Entering References Manually
Click on the button on the top left of the screen. Select Add Entry Manually.
A new Document Box will appear (it defaults to Journal Article). Use the drop down arrow to select your media and then complete relevant information.
The reference that you have added will be listed in My References.
Tomorrow we will learn how to import reference information from our library catalogue and also how to import our pdf documents, iFind