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Mellon College of Science: 38-302: PROPEL: Science and Society: Organizing Literature with Mendeley

This guide provides information and resources that will be useful for the group projects.

About this Guide

Here, we have collected resources to help you learn how to use Mendeley for your projects. In the tabs, you will find the basics you need to know: 

 

You can learn how to use Mendeley by watching the short videos embedded in this guide. The videos touch upon some more advanced features, but we highlight the basic take home points below each video.

If you need any help with Mendeley, please get in touch with a science librarian (contact info on home page of this guide).

What is Mendeley?

In the process of doing research, you will encounter a multitude of resources including books, articles, and websites.  Keeping all of these organized as you progress, and ultimately creating a bibliography using a particular citation style can be a daunting and time-consuming task. 

But with the easy-to-use citation management tool, Mendeley, you will be able to:

  • organize and save the resources on the cloud, allowing you to access them from any device
  • share resources such as PDFs or websites with other students for group projects
  • generate bibliographies in nearly any citation style with a click of a button

Mendeley can be a useful tool for projects in any of your classes and in your future careers! On this page are a collection of short videos that will help get you started with Mendeley.

 

Getting Started with Mendeley

Watch this 5 minute video for a brief overview of Mendeley.

Here are some useful terms to review.

Mendeley Desktop: Mendeley Desktop is the downloaded part of the software installed onto your computer. 

Mendeley Web: This is the Mendeley website where you can access the web version of your library, edit your profile and search for papers, groups or people. You can also access Mendeley's social features.

Sync: The process of synchronizing your Mendeley data across devices.

Web Importer: The browser bookmarklet that lets you quickly import documents from anywhere on the web.

Citation Plugin: A plugin you can install that allows you to create and format your citations and bibliography according to your chosen style. 

Sign Up and Download

Get started with Mendeley by clicking on "Create a free account" here. Sign up requires first name, last name, and an email address. Be sure to use your Andrew ID email account when you sign up, to take advantage of the added benefits of CMU's institutional Mendeley, including more storage space and larger group sizes for shared libraries.

To take full advantage of Mendeley, you will need to download:

  • the Mendeley Desktop 
  • the Web Importer
  • the Citation Plugin

You can download all of these here if you haven't already done so.

 

Need Help? Contact a Science Librarian.

 

Melanie Gainey, Biological Sciences Librarian, mgainey@andrew.cmu.edu​

 

Huajin Wang, Bioinformatics & Computational Biology Librarian, huajinw@cmu.edu

 

Neelam Bharti, Chemistry Librarian, nbharti@andrew.cmu.edu​

 

Matt Marsteller, Mathematical Sciences & Physics Librarian, matthewm@andrew.cmu.edu​