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Citation Managers

Software and apps to help you organize and format citations for your research papers.

How To

Getting started

  1. 1. Go to Mendeley.com to create your account

  1. 2. Download the desktop version from https://www.mendeley.com/download-desktop/ and sign in with the email and password that you used to create your account. 

Mendeley has a plug-in for both Chrome & Firefox known as the Mendeley Web Importer that makes it quick & easy to capture PDFs and citation information as you're navigating databases and journals. Check out the Mendeley Quick Tips below for working with Mendeley.

To create a new folder, select the Folder icon at the top of the screen. 

To add documents in your library into a folder, drop and drag into the folder. 

 

From EBSCO databases 

On the right side under Tools, select Export and then select Direct Export in RIS 

From Web of Science

  1. Select "Export" 
  2. Click on "Other File Formats" and choose "Bibtex" 
  3. In Mendeley desktop, select Add and then select the BibTex file you downloaded.  

From the Library Catalogue 

  1. Click on the article title and select Export BibTeX 
  2. Download by selecting the green DOWNLOAD button.  
  3. In your desktop Zotero, select File, import, and select the downloaded file which will have the file name starting with Primo_BibTex.

 

Mendeley Web Importer is available for Chrome, Firefox, Safari and IE 10 browsers.  This allows you to import papers, webpages, and documents directly into your reference library. This plugin syncs with your Mendeley account and allows you to save article information across multiple computers.  

There are a couple of ways to get PDFs into Mendeley.

 

If you're using the Mendeley Web Importer, you can save the PDF and citation to your library by clicking on the importer icon in the top right corner of your browser.

 

For previously downloaded articles, you can drag & drop downloaded them into Mendeley. 

 

 

To annotate PDFs, click on the PDF icon for the article you want to annotate. 

  • You can add general notes by selecting Note. 
  • You can highlight text with the highlight button. You can also select different colors to color-code your highlighted text. 
  • To add notes to the article information, click on the article in your library and select Notes on the right side of the screen (between Details and Contents)

To view all documents in your library in the citation style of your choosing, click on View and then the citation you need from the Citation Style drop-down menu. Next, select View again and click on Library as Citations.

When you're ready to create a reference list, select the articles you need in your library and drop & drag into Word. If you've already selected Library as Citations, your documents will appear formatted in your preferred citation style after you've dragged them into Word. 

About Mendeley

Mendeley, now owned by Elsevier, is similar to Zotero in that it is a cloud-based tool for collecting and organizing citations and for connecting with other researchers. It offers greater data storage limits than Zotero in its basic (free) service to back up your articles and access them from anywhere you have internet access.