1. 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

2. Health and Safety

3. General Information

Sign in: Pink Attendance Sheet
Please fill in the online feedback at the end of the course
Start->All Programs->Popular Applications->Course Feedback/

Course files can be downloaded from:
www.ucs.cam.ac.uk/support/courses/files

Let us know if you need assistance: Please ask
questions

4. 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

5. 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 List
Newspaper Research

6. 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

7. 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…

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

9. 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

10. 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!

11. 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.

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

14. Drag and drop the link
to the reference to attach it

15. 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/