Hey guys, welcome to another episode of Grad Coach TV. my name is Derek and in
this episode we're gonna be looking at a reference management software called
Mendeley. It's a very popular reference manager we've spoken about Zotero
previously on Grad Coach TV but some of you have come back and said hey could
you do a video on Mendeley? I've heard it's really good. So in this episode 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. So let's
have a look at it. Right, so the first thing you're gonna have to do is
download the Mendeley software. You can get that on Mendeley website that's
mendeley.com. Click on the reference management tab in
the top left and click the download now button. Mandalay 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. Then just go ahead 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 Mandalay. 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 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.
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. So for example, here I have a
collection of various resources and if i just take one and drop it straight into
Mendeley, you can see that not only is it listed, but it's fully populated on
this side including the year, the volume, the issue, abstract etc. So this is really
really 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 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. 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 I'll 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
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 which we installed this little earlier. So let's
take a look at that. 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. In this case I'm using Firefox -
you might use something else. There's
support for all the major browsers. So
let's say we want to cite the article on this page right now. So this is from
Entreprenuer and it's a news article. What you'll then do is while we're on
the page, click this little button up here and we'll need to sign into the
account and once we signed in we'll see a screen that looks like this. So as you
can see, Mendeley is automatically detected that it's a web page (surprise,
surprise) 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. 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 entry manually". 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. Pretty
straightforward. Right so now you've got your Mendeley database nice and
populated, you've got all your resources in 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. there are a lot of
variants on the Harvard style, for example, and you'll find them if you just
search using the keyword Harvard you'll see all the options over here. 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 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 Glaeser et al and we are
parenthesizing the year and then onward. So those are just two different styles
of citation or two different ways of writing and thankfully Mendeley allows
you to just edit in line and will still save the reference and no problem. So the
last thing you want to do obviously is build a reference list and it couldn't
be easier. You just write your title out (this would usually be on a new page) and
you click insert bibliography and there you have it. Mendeley's gone and built
your entire bibliography, all up to date as per the data that you have in the
Mendeley database. So that's Mendeley reference management software. We looked
at the Mendely desktop version, we looked at the Mendeley web importer and of course the Microsoft
Word integration. Overall, fantastic piece of software. There's a reason it's so
popular. If you haven't chosen a reference management software yet, this
is a great option. If you're using Zotero as our previously recommended and you
had a look at this video and said well this looks better,
Mendeley does have an import option, so you can just import or relocate all of
your data from Zotero through to Mandalay. It's up to you - both pieces of
software are great. So I really hope that you enjoyed this video. If you have any
questions or any comments or suggestions please leave them in the comments
section or get in touch with us - our email is hello@grad.coach.
This is Derek from Grad Coach, signing out.