Speaker 1: In this video, I'm going to show you exactly how to use Mendeley to save yourself hours, days, or maybe even a week's worth of work formatting references and citations. I'm going to walk you through the entire process from registering and installing the required tools to managing your Mendeley library and using it efficiently within Microsoft Word. Let's do it. Hey, Derek here from Grad Coach. To kick things off, here's a quick overview of how this tutorial will be structured. First, I'm going to explain what exactly Mendeley is and why it's such a useful tool to have in your academic writing arsenal. Then, I'll walk you through the registration and installation process so that you can get all of the essential pieces in place from day one. From there, I'll walk you through the actual Mendeley library interface, explain each section so that you can get maximum value from the software. Once we've laid that foundation, we'll look at the various ways in which you can add resources and keep your reference library perfectly organized within Mendeley. And then, last but not least, we'll look at how to actually use Mendeley within Microsoft Word to make inserting citations and building your reference list super, super simple. So, without further delay, let's jump into it. So, let's start by first addressing the question, what exactly is Mendeley? And more importantly, why should you even use it? Well, Mendeley is a fantastic free little tool that makes the task of referencing a lot easier and more accurate. Essentially, you load up all of your reference information into Mendeley just once, and then Mendeley will make sure that all of your in-text citations, as well as your reference list, are perfectly formatted according to your university's required referencing for example, APA or Harvard and so on. Simply put, Mendeley takes care of the tiresome and error-prone task of formatting citations and references, and this saves you loads and loads of time and ensures that all of this is done 100% accurately, which is near impossible if you're trying to do it manually. But that's not all. Mendeley also provides some useful functionality in terms of keeping your references organized, sharing them with other team members, and even finding relevant journal articles. Long story short, if you're currently writing out your reference list manually, you need to get on the Mendeley train. So let's look at how to do that. If you visit the Mendeley site, and we'll include a link to that in the description, you'll see that there are multiple options, web versions, desktop apps, plugins, and so on. So let's look at what specifically you do and don't actually need. The first thing you'll need to do is register for a Mendeley account. This account is completely free and it just takes a minute to set it up. So all you need to do is click the little create account button in the top right corner and enter your details. Once you've done that, the next thing that you'll need to do is add the Mendeley web importer to your browser. For example, Chrome or Firefox. The web importer is a browser plugin that allows you to quickly add web-based resources to your Mendeley library. For example, news articles, journal articles, or even just general web pages. I'll show you how to use this tool a little later in the video, but for now, you just need to add the web importer to your browser. To do this, just head over to the URL shown on screen and add the plugin to your browser. Last but not least, you'll need to get the Mendeley site plugin. And this plugin is what connects Mendeley, or more specifically all of the reference data that you'll have in your Mendeley library, with Microsoft Word, which you'll use to write up your work, of course. Again, this is a free plugin and you can access that using the link on the screen. And we'll also include all of these links in the description below the video. Right, so now you've got a Mendeley account, you've got the web importer plugin, and you've got Mendeley site installed. So you are ready to get started. At this point, you might be thinking, well, what about the desktop app, the Mendeley desktop app? Well, if you want to use the desktop application to manage your Mendeley library, you are absolutely welcome to do so. But to be honest, I've found that the web version, which you've already registered for, is just as good and it also reduces the hassle of having yet another piece of software on your PC. The web version also ensures that all of your reference information is perfectly synchronized to the cloud, and there's no risk of synchronization issues between your desktop and the cloud account. All of that said, there's absolutely no problem if you want to use the desktop version. Everything we discussed in this video will still be relevant. All right, so now that we have all of the puzzle pieces in place, let's take a look at the Mendeley interface so that you can understand what each section does and how to get the most out of Mendeley. The home base of Mendeley is what's called the library. To access that, you'll head over to Mendeley.com forward slash library, or you can just click the library button in the top right corner of the main Mendeley site. This area is where you're going to manage all of your reference data. Now, naturally, when you start out, you won't have any resources in your library, so yours will be blank. But you can see what a more populated library looks like. Don't worry, I'll show you exactly how to add resources to your library later in this tutorial. So if we look at the main menu on the left, the first section is essentially a set of filters providing different ways in which you can sift through your reference data. Most commonly, you'll be on the all references section or option, but you can also view recently added references, favorites, and so on. The next section is the collection section. Collections are essentially folders in which you can place related papers in whichever sort of organizational system you like. For example, if your study involves analyzing key variables, you might have a collection for each variable. Or if you're looking at an issue through different disciplinary lenses, you might have a collection for each one of those lenses. It's completely up to you how you sort this all out. And again, I'll show you how to use this functionality a little bit later. Continuing downward, the final section is the groups section. Now, groups allows you to share reference information and collaborate with up to 25 people. At least that was the limit at the time of recording this video. This is really useful functionality, for example, if you're working on a group project and you want to share reference information between different group members. Heading back up to the top of the page, you'll see a button called notebook. Now, the notebook is a place where you can jot down any general notes that you want to make. These notes are called pages in Mendeley. And it's important to note that they're not directly linked to any specific reference. So this is a useful place to just pen down general thoughts that you can visit or revisit at a later stage. If you do want to make notes that are specific to a resource, you can certainly do that. And the feature for that is called annotations, which we'll look at in the next section. All right. So that's just a quick overview of the library interface. And that's just to give you a big picture view. And now that we've got that out of the way, let's look at how to actually use Mendeley. So the first thing that you'll need to do is add all of your actual reference data into Mendeley. This is naturally the least exciting part for most students. But the good news is that Mendeley offers quite a few options in this regard. I'll show you all of the options and you can decide what works best for you. The first way to add reference data to Mendeley is to manually input it. This is naturally the slowest way, but I want to talk about it first so that you can see exactly what information Mendeley captures. So the way that you do this is to click the little add new button, followed by add entry manually. As you can see, Mendeley then allows you to manually enter all of the key information such as the author, the date, the title, and so on. One thing to notice is that depending on the type of resource, the available fields within Mendeley will change. For example, if you select television broadcast, the fields will be different from that of a journal article. A useful thing to note here is that you can fast track this process by using an identifier. For example, you can search for a DOI or a PubMed ID and it will auto-populate all of that information. If you're not familiar with identifiers, don't worry. They're certainly not essential. It's just useful to be aware of if you do have this information on hand. Moving on to the second way to add reference data to Mendeley, which is to upload the PDF article. Naturally, this is only useful if you do indeed have a PDF copy of the resource and also if it's a journal article. For the most part, when you upload a journal article PDF, Mendeley will be able to auto-populate the fields, which will save you a lot of time and effort filling all of that yourself. Although, it's always good to double check this automated data. The main benefit of using this method that is uploading a PDF is that it means that Mendeley will include a copy of that PDF within the Mendeley interface, which makes it easier for you to access the article whenever you need. This approach will also allow you to make highlighted annotations and notes within the article itself. Of course, I'll show you how to do all of this in the next section. The next way to add reference information to Mendeley is to use the web importer, which if you remember is the little browser plugin that we installed a little bit earlier. To use the web importer, you can simply visit the web page for any given resource, for example, a news article or a journal article within an academic database, and then click the little Mendeley icon up in the top right-hand corner of your browser. From there, you can easily add the resource to your library, or you can put it into a specific collection or a group. When using this option, it's again a good idea to double check the imported information as the data isn't always perfect. You can do that by clicking on the little pencil icon over here, or by editing the information in the library at a later stage. This is particularly important when you're using the web importer to add general web pages, in other words, non-academic resources. This is because there'll often be some missing information from web pages that you still need to insert into the system. All right, onto the final option, which is to use Mendeley's own search engine. You can access this by visiting mendeley.com forward slash search, and again, we'll include that link below. Mendeley search is similar to Google Scholar in terms of its functionality, meaning that you can simply enter the name of the journal article that you're looking for, and once you find it, you can then click the little add to library link. You can also use Mendeley search to find relevant journal articles by just entering a keyword. For example, if you search for a keyword like job satisfaction, you can see that Mendeley returns loads of results, and you can filter these by date, by resource type, and so on. This functionality is particularly useful for finding resources as Mendeley search often allows you to get access to the full article in PDF format, which of course is great. So that covers the main options in terms of getting reference data into your Mendeley library. Of course, if you are currently using a different reference management software and you want to move that over into Mendeley, you can also import your full library using a few different formats. Specifically, Mendeley allows you to import Bibtex, Endnote, and RIS files. To do that, just click the little add new button followed by import library. All right, so now that we've added our reference information into Mendeley, let's talk about how you can manage all of this library information effectively. Mendeley offers a few different options in this regard. First, let's look at favorites. Essentially, you can mark any resource as a favorite by clicking the little star next to the author name. By doing this, you'll be able to shortlist your favorites by selecting the little favorites option on the left side menu. This is pretty basic functionality, but it can be useful if you want to quickly access a small group of key articles. The next option, which is a little bit more sophisticated, is called tags. You can create as many different tags as you like, and then you can mark up any given resource with the relevant tag or multiple tags. Once you've done that, you can use the filter option up in the top right corner to quickly view all of the articles using the respective tag. Note that you can also filter by author, which can be useful in certain situations. The next bit of functionality to be aware of is collections. As I mentioned earlier, collections are much like folders, which means that you can use collections to group resources into certain themes, methodologies, variables, and so on. To create a collection, just click the new collection section and enter a name for that collection. Then you can just drag and drop the relevant resources into the collection. It's worth pointing out that all of your resources will always be visible in the all references section, so don't worry about not being able to remember which collection you dropped a resource into. You'll always be able to find that in the all references section. Now it's worth mentioning that favorites, tags, and collections are all pretty useful ways to organize your reference data, but if you are working with a large collection of references for something like a literature review, it's best to use a literature catalog spreadsheet to keep track of all your resources. By using a custom spreadsheet, you can create as many different attributes as you like, and you can easily filter and sort according to a specific attribute, for example, a certain methodology or a certain context. If you'd like, we do have a free literature catalog spreadsheet that you can download and customize as you wish. You can access that using the link in the description. Right, the next bit of functionality to look at is Mendeley's groups. As I mentioned earlier, the groups functionality allows you to share reference information with your colleagues, which can be super useful for collaborative research projects. To do this, just create a group by selecting new group, and then click the three dot menu and select manage group to add members to your group. To add references to any given group, simply return to the all references section, and then drag and drop the relevant references into the group. Again, don't worry about this action moving your references out of your library, because any reference that you share with a group will still be accessible in your library under the all references section. Last but not least, let's quickly look at the notebook function, which you can find in the top of the library interface. As I mentioned, the notebook section is a flexible space where you can make general notes that are not specific to any given resource. To create a note or what Mendeley refers to as a page, just click the notes button, and then click the new page link at the bottom. Once you've created a note, it will be live in your Mendeley library, but you can also export your notes as RTF files, which are just text files that you can open with any word processor. This is super useful if you want to print your notes at some point, or if you want to store them somewhere else. Within the notes section, you'll also notice an option called annotations. The annotations function allows you to make notes about a specific resource, whereas the notes function just provides a generic scratchpad. This can be super useful for jutting down insights or key takeaways for each resource that you review. To use annotations, just select the resource that you want to make a note for or an annotation for, and then click the annotation section and enter your notes. For resources where you've uploaded the PDF version, you can also make notes that are specific to a certain section within that PDF. To do that, just select the respective resource and click the read button. From there, click the speech bubble icon to activate notes mode, and then click the section in which you want to place that note. Any notes that you make in this way will also show up in the annotation section, so this can be a really useful bit of functionality. Equally useful is the highlighter function, which allows you to highlight sentences or sections in different colors. To access this, just click the little highlighter button to the left of the notes button and select the color that you want to use. You can then highlight the document as you wish, and all of this will be saved within Mendeley, which is super, super useful. All right, so now that we've looked at how to add and manage your reference data within Mendeley, it's time to get to the most important part, which is using Mendeley within your actual Word document. This is where the magic really happens, so let's take a look. Here I'm using Microsoft's online version of Word, but the layout and the process will be much the same if you're using the desktop version. So the first thing that you want to do is open the Mendeley site plugin within Word, and you can find that over in the references tab or sometimes the add-ins tab. When you open Mendeley site for the first time, it will ask you to log into Mendeley, and once you've done that, you'll see that you have a sort of minified version of your Mendeley library within Word on the right sidebar. Once you've got that open, you'll need to set the citation style for your document, for example APA or Harvard, and to do this just click on the citation settings tab and then hit the change citation style link. You can then select whichever style your university requires. If you don't see the required style in this list, you can search for more styles by clicking the button titled search for another style down at the bottom. Mendeley also allows you to use custom styles, so if your university does have a custom style in Mendeley format, you can just add that here with minimal fuss. Once that's all set, you can return to the references section within the Mendeley tab and get to work adding your citations to the document. To add an in-text citation, simply place your cursor where you want the citation added, and then select the relevant resource in the Mendeley tab by ticking it. Afterwards, you can just hit the little insert button. If you want to add multiple resources to a single citation, simply tick the relevant resources and follow the same process. Now by default, Mendeley will insert citations in parentheses or in brackets, but if you want to change the citation to a narrative style, you can just edit that within the body text. Just make sure that you retain the little box around the citation so that Mendeley recognizes it as a citation and includes it within your reference list. In terms of finding the resources that you're wanting to cite, you can use the little drop-down menu to look through your favorites, your collections, and so forth, and you can just search for articles using the search bar. So the interface within Word is very similar to the actual Mendeley library interface. I'll quickly add a few more citations here, and then we can look at how to build a reference list or what Mendeley calls a bibliography. To create a reference list, all you need to do is head over to the section of the document where you want to place that list and then click the little three dot menu in the Mendeley plugin, followed by insert bibliography. Mendeley then does all the hard work for you. As you can see, it generates a complete reference list based on the resources that you cited in your document. This is perfectly formatted according to the style that you specified earlier, which saves you a huge amount of time. Now as long as you have captured the reference information correctly when you added the resources to Mendeley, you can rest assured that this list is absolutely 100% accurate. The only thing that you may still need to do is to set your line spacing based on your university's requirements. For example, APA or MLA will require double line spacing. If you're using either of these systems, APA or MLA, be sure to check out our video tutorials. You can find the links to those in the description. If you got value from this tutorial, we'd really, really appreciate if you hit that like button so that more students can find this resource. If you want to learn more about academic writing and research, be sure to subscribe to the Grad Coach channel, but also check out the Grad Coach blog where you can find tons of free resources, tools, and guides to fast track your academic writing. Until next time, good luck.