Mendeley A free, open-source PDF management program

Monday 14th May 2:15 – 4:15 pm

Rosemary Rodd rr25@cam.ac.uk

LL-support@ucs.cam.ac.uk

service-desk@ucs.cam.ac.uk

Health and Safety

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Start->All Programs->Popular Applications->Course Feedback/ Course files can be downloaded from:

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questions

General Information

General Information

Objectives: learn to use the software to organize PDFs and add their associated references to a document.

Pre-requisites: use of a web browser Duration & Break: 2 hours - feel free to go out when you need to, but

no food/drink in the teaching room, please. Course Material: workbook Delivery Style: self-paced

Follow-on courses: Word 2007: Mastering Dissertations and Theses (Level 3)Web Skills for Researchers: Web of Knowledge and Scopus

Courses run by University Library Referencing Without Tears, How To Do A Literature Search, How To Find Things on Your Reading ListNewspaper Research

What is Mendeley?

A database program specifically designed to organize PDF files.

Originally just a PDF management program: citation manipulation was added on later.

References may be used to document any kind of information source. For example:

  Print material: books, journal articles... Audiovisual:  TV, radio, film, podcast... Music: CD, MPG... Images: paintings, drawings, photos... Web pages

Editing Mendeley Output Styles

Mendeley output styles are written in the XML based Citation Style Language—unfortunately there is no GUI editor at present.

This means it is possible to edit styles if you cannot find one that fits your requirements, but it is not easy

The next slide shows the beginning of a style definition written in CSL…

?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><?oxygen RNGSchema="http://xbiblio.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/*checkout*/xbiblio/csl/

schema/trunk/csl.rnc" type="compact"?>

<style xmlns="http://purl.org/net/xbiblio/csl" class="in-text" xml:lang="en"> <info>…. </info> <macro name="title"> <choose> <if type="book"> <text variable="title" font-style="italic"/> </if> <else> <text variable="title"/> </else> </choose> …

Some online tutorials on editing CSL Styles

http://www.condast.com/zotero/index.html

http://www.zotero.org/support/csl_simple_edits

http://citationstyles.org/downloads/primer.html

Check with your supervisor!

If your discipline requires very complicated rules for reference layout it may be tricky (occasionally impossible) to find a style in Mendeley which will satisfy the requirements.

ALWAYS produce a small sample and show it to your supervisor, publisher etc. for approval before doing a large amount of work.

Your supervisor is also the right person to ask for advice about discipline-related protocols such as anonymisation of any personal data you have collected. Don't leave all this until the week before you are due to submit your work!

Social Aspects

“People like you read...”

Once you have a significant library of PDFs that you regularly sync online Mendeley will begin to suggest other papers that may be relevant to your work.

As you accept or reject suggestions, Mendeley learns more about the topics that are relevant to you

Drag and drop the link

to the reference to attach it

This course covers

Adding PDF files to Mendeley Using the program to insert formatted references into documents. Mendeley's “social” aspects which will help you to discover useful

papers relevant to your discipline.

It doesn’t discuss selecting suitable online databases of references in any depth.

If you are doubtful about where to start I would strongly recommend attending the Webskills for Researchers courses and also visiting the University Library’s eresources page www.lib.cam.ac.uk/electronicresources/