Overview of Mendeley
Citation management tools will help you create bibliographies and also insert your citations in your paper. First, you must identify those items that you think you will use in your paper by search databases, UC Library Search, or even Google Scholar and adding it to your account.
Mendeley is a popular citation management tool created by the Elsevier publishing company. Basic information:
- Cost: free to sign up for and use
- Includes a desktop application called Mendeley Reference Manager, as well as a cloud-based Web version. You can keep your library synced for easy access wherever you are working
- 2TB of free storage, upgrade is available if you need more storage
- Additional downloadable tools include
- Web Importer: browser extension for capturing citations from database search result pages or articles
- Mendeley Cite: add-in for word processor (Word, LibreOffice) to manage citations in your manuscript
- Supports Mac, Windows and some Linux
- Attach files including PDFs
- Annotate PDFs and make other notes
- Organize materials in "collections"
- Share collections with collaborators (there are limitations on sharing full text)
Get Started
- Create an account at Mendeley.com - we recommend NOT using your UCSD email address. Create your own password.
- NOTE: if you are using Chrome and you are logged in to any other UCSD-licensed resources, you may get redirected to a UCSD login screen that doesn't work. Solutions: log out of your UCSD profile, use an "Incognito Window" or use a different browser. This is a known but intermittent glitch across the UC campuses.
- Download Reference Manager desktop software - the Mendeley website will detect your OS and direct you to the correct version
