Hello and welcome to Using Mendeley at RIT, a series of tutorials designed to get you
familiar with using the Mendeley citation management system.
Mendeley is a free reference manager that works with all major operating systems and web browsers
and allows you to create accurate citations and bibliographies in Microsoft Word.
I'm Roman Koshykar, computing and information sciences librarian at the RIT libraries.
I have prepared an Infoguide on Mendeley on our library's info guides website.
This is here to allow you to learn how to use this tool better,
and the very first page of that guide is Getting Started with Mendeley.
There are four steps you must take as a new user - first, download Mendeley to your computer
and then create an account that you will use to log into Mendeley. You'll also want to install
a web importer for the browser of your choice and install Mendeley Cite in Microsoft Word.
Once you have installed the Mendeley Reference Manager and created a Mendeley account,
you're ready to get started.
Don't forget also to install the Mendeley Web Importer and install Mendeley Cite in
Microsoft Word. Mendeley Reference Manager will install for Windows, Mac, or Linux
as a desktop application. When you open the program you'll be presented with a login.
You will not be able to sign in via your institution - recall on the guide that i
specified that Mendeley does not connect to your existing RIT computer account,
so when you create that account it will need to be unique to Mendeley,
However, you can use your RIT email address, as I have.
i will enter in my password to sign in to Mendeley Reference Manager.
Once you have installed the Mendeley Web Importer for Firefox, Chrome, Safari, or Edge,
Mendeley Web Importer can be enabled in your browser toolbar as an extension or add-on
and used as one of the methods for building your library of references.
On the second page of the guide, I have outlined a number
of methods for adding references to your Mendeley library. In this tutorial, I will demonstrate
first the use of the web importer and also the importation of PDFs directly into Mendeley.
If we go to the RIT library's web page and search for articles in Science Direct
I can use the search term dinosaurs
If I find an article of interest to me
I can use the Mendeley Web Importer to add that to Mendeley.
First, I have to sign in with my email address and Mendeley password
Same as I used to sign into the reference manager.
This will allow everything to sync between the web importer and my reference manager.
The web importer will ask if you want to import the PDF. Unfortunately, in this case, the PDF was
not found - that's okay. For demonstration purposes, I will simply add the reference.
And it has been added.
Now when I go to Mendeley Reference Manager, I can see
that today I have added this particular article.
Many researchers already have a folder full of articles and PDFs stored on their computer that
they've been reading and engaging with, and Mendeley is a very helpful tool for not only
organizing those PDFs, but also finding the citation information to accurately cite them
in your writing, and on the building your library page of the guide, I provide some
basic instructions on how to do that, but I'd like to demonstrate that. Here is a PDF article
and if i want to add that to Mendeley, I add a new file from my computer
choose that PDF from my downloads folder and open it. Then Mendeley processes the file
and adds all of the citation metadata to that
so you can see with this indicator here that there is a file associated with this reference.
And if I click on that and open it up, I see that Mendeley has added the title of the article,
the author's names, the journal citation information, and the abstract as well.
And that's all for part one of this series of tutorials on using Mendeley at RIT. As a reminder,
on the Mendeley Infoguide, I provide more examples of how to build your library of references
in several other ways, as well as provide details on importing PDFs and using the web importer,
as I demonstrated. In part two of this tutorial series, I will discuss using Mendeley as an
organizational tool for your research, and I hope you'll join me for part two. That's all for now.