Welcome to part two of a series of tutorials on using Mendeley at RIT.
This is Roman Koshykar, computing and information sciences librarian.
In this part of the tutorial, I'd like to talk about organizing your library of references
using Mendeley. Mendeley has a number of very useful organizational features that we'll begin
to demonstrate here by showing you how to navigate the Mendeley Reference Manager, and move on to how
to create private groups, and then I'll also talk about using the Annotate PDFs feature
to make personal notes directly on your documents that are saved in Mendeley.
And just as a reminder, this Infoguides page will remain
your source for instructions and other information on how to use Mendeley.
Everything in your Mendeley library is fully searchable.
So you can search for a keyword such as dinosaurs, and retrieve all of the references that have
that word in them. You can also apply filters, filtering by an author's name, or by a tag such
as academic writing, so any references tagged with the term academic writing will come up instantly.
You can sort by the date added, the year of publication, and any of these other
particular fields, if you wish. You can also save items to your favorites by marking the star
and then know that everything can be retrieved that way. You can also create new collections
and place references into collections based on
whatever scheme you wish to use. For instance, I have a collection called t-rex,
and I've placed these three references in that collection previously.
A useful organizational feature of Mendeley that's also a collaborative feature is private groups,
which can be used to share documents and references with collaborators and partners.
You can create a group by scrolling down to the bottom of the left-hand menu - enter in the
name of a new group, or to work with an existing group, right click on it and select manage group.
Where you can invite up to 25 members by email, and you can then add
references and documents, and your group members can add
references and documents to this group that will be shared amongst all the members of the group.
Mendeley offers several annotation and notes features, which are very helpful for organizing
not just your references and documents, but your thoughts about your own research.
There is a general notebook that you can always add new pages to,
to make general notes about your own research projects.
You can open an individual reference
by clicking on the title, and then add general notes about that reference,
such as "read before thesis proposal."
And, if you open a reference that has a PDF document associated, you can use the
notes and highlights features built into Mendeley. To add a note, click the icon
and write your sticky note to yourself, which will always be attached to this document.
And then use the highlight tool here - select the color of highlight that you want
select the highlight tool
and highlight any text that you wish within the document PDF.
More information about annotating PDFs
and other advanced features of Mendeley can be found on the Mendeley Infoguide.
This concludes part two of the series of tutorials, and I thank you for your attention and
hope you join me for part three, where I'll talk about using Mendeley as a citation writing tool.