Hey guys, welcome to another episode of
Grad Coach TV. my name is Derek and in this episode we're gonna be looking at a
reference management software called Mendeley. It's a very popular reference
manager we've spoken about Zotero previously on Grad Coach TV but some of
you have come back and said hey could you do a video on Mendeley? I've heard it's really good. So in this episode we're going to be looking at how to use
Mendeley - in particular Mendeley desktop as well as the Mendeley web importer and the Microsoft Word integration. So let's have a look at it. Right, so the first
thing you're gonna have to do is download the Mendeley software. You can get that on Mendeley website that's mendeley.com. Click on the reference management tab in the top left and click the download now
button. Mandalay is available for Windows. It's available for Mac. it's available
for Linux. So you shouldn't have any problems in terms of compatibility. Then just go ahead download and install it. Alright so once that's installed
you'll have a piece of software that looks something like this. Now yours
might have a popup message because it's your first time using it and that's fine.
You can just close it I'll show you how to do everything from within the
software. So this is your home base, this is Mendeley desktop. The first thing that
you want to do is install all the add-ons so to do that you'll go to the
Tools menu and you'll say install web importer and install the Microsoft Word
plugin. Once those are installed you're ready to go. Okay, so the first thing
you've got to do is populate your reference management tool, in this case
Mandalay. Now this is standard for pretty much any software you're always going to
have to populate first before you can go and drop citations into a document
Thankfully, Mendeley has a few ways to do this and some of them are really easy. So
let's take a look at the options. All right, the first option you have in
terms of bringing your citations or bringing your literature into Mendeley
is quite simply just to drag and drop the PDF files that you have into the
interface. So for example, here I have a collection of various resources and if i
just take one and drop it straight into Mendeley, you can see that not only is it
listed, but it's fully populated on this side including the year, the volume,
the issue, abstract etc. So this is really really handy - this can really save you
time. There is however a massive limitation and that this only really
works for journal articles. So if you're importing anything other than a journal
article, if it's a a chapter of a textbook or anything other than a
journal article, it probably won't be as good. You can certainly give it a try, but
it might not have the right information what is really great about dropping a
PDF file straight into Mendeley is that it actually goes and saves that you'll
see down at the bottom right here it goes and saves it into the software. So
not only do you have all your records or all your citations in one place, but you
can actually easily access the PDF directly from Mendeley, which is pretty
neat. Right, the second way to populate your Mendeley database is to use Mendeley's built in literature search functionality. So let's have a look at that. So to use
this function you'll just go up to the literature search button up in the top
left over here, and then you just basically search for
whatever keyword or title of a journal article you're looking for. So I'll just
search for something in generic like trust and Mendeley returns a whole lot
of options so you'll see that for each of these it has full details. It has the
abstract that has all the details of the journal articles so that's really handy
provided what you're searching for is a journal article or a well-known piece of
work so to import any of these into my database. I'll just go and click the save
reference button up top here. I'm going to install a few or import a few just so
that we have something to work with at a later stage. Right so then going back to
my document library you can see that I now have quite a few options here in terms of the literature that is in my database. So the literature
search functionality is really handy when you're searching for a journal
article or something that is widely published in academic circles. But if you
want to import or if you want to cite a webpage, for example say a blog post from a reputable source you're not gonna have the record within that literature search
database. So what you then do is you use Mendeley's web importer function which we installed this little earlier. So let's take a look at that. So once you've installed the Mendeley web importer you'll see that it has a
little icon, or that you have a new little icon in the top right of your
browser. In this case I'm using Firefox - you might use something else. There's support for all the major browsers. So let's say we want to cite the article on
this page right now. So this is from Entreprenuer and it's a news article.
What you'll then do is while we're on the page, click this little button up
here and we'll need to sign into the account and once we signed in we'll see
a screen that looks like this. So as you can see, Mendeley is automatically
detected that it's a web page (surprise, surprise) and it's populated the title.
Now in some cases it will populate the author name and other information, but
for the most part that's really up to you to go and populate this. Once you've
done that you can click Save and that will automatically feed straight into
your Mendeley database. All right, so those are three pretty easy ways to
import, or at least to find the right information, but sometimes you're just
going to be left to manually insert data into the Mendeley database and let's
just have a quick look at how you do that. So in the Mendeley desktop app,
you're just gonna right click in this white area over here and you're gonna say
"add entry manually". First thing you need to select is the type of resource. So
that might be a book section it might be a piece of film it might be an
encyclopedia article. You just select what's appropriate and you fill in the
data and it will go and populate. Pretty straightforward. Right so now you've got
your Mendeley database nice and populated, you've got all your resources
in that you want to cite, and the next step is naturally to drop it into a Word document - so let's take a look at how you do that. Once
you've installed the Mendeley Microsoft Word add in, which we did right in the beginning, you'll see that there's a new
option in the references tab of your Microsoft Word and you'll see that the biggest button says insert citation - so this is pretty straightforward. But,
before you do that, the first thing you need to do is select your style, in other words, Harvard, APA or whatever your preference is. Or whatever the
requirement of the university is. So you'll click the little drop down over
there and you'll usually find most of the popular ones in this drop-down. But
if not you can go to more styles and you'll have the option to go and search
for more styles. there are a lot of variants on the Harvard style, for
example, and you'll find them if you just search using the keyword Harvard you'll
see all the options over here. All right, so you've selected the style that you
need for - this example let's just choose Elsevier Harvard - and you're going to
naturally have two requirements. One is to insert citations and the other is to
build a reference list. So to insert citations it's pretty straightforward.
You would just write your text as you normally would and then when it comes
time to insert the title citation, you just literally click that button up
there, search for the relevant citation and there you go. Let's just do this a
few times so that there's something of a list to work with and let's
just do one more. Okay, so there we have three options, or rather three references
citations that have been put into a document and it's now time to build a
reference list. But before we do that, let's just look at how one goes about
changing the formatting if you need to. So in this instance we've gone and we've
used a standard citation format where it is first our statement and then just a
citation to the author. If you want to give the author more authoritative voice
in your writing, what you can do is quite simply just change the style manually
intervening. The moment you do this Mendeley will ask you if you want to edit and you'll say yes you do. So in this case we're just changing
it to Glaeser et al and we are parenthesizing the year and then onward.
So those are just two different styles of citation or two different ways of
writing and thankfully Mendeley allows you to just edit in line and will still
save the reference and no problem. So the last thing you want to do obviously is
build a reference list and it couldn't be easier. You just write your title out
(this would usually be on a new page) and you click insert bibliography and there
you have it. Mendeley's gone and built your entire bibliography, all up to date
as per the data that you have in the Mendeley database. So that's Mendeley
reference management software. We looked at the Mendely desktop version, we looked at the Mendeley web importer and of course the Microsoft Word integration. Overall, fantastic piece
of software. There's a reason it's so popular. If you haven't chosen a
reference management software yet, this is a great option. If you're using Zotero
as our previously recommended and you had a look at this video and said well
this looks better, Mendeley does have an import option, so
you can just import or relocate all of your data from Zotero through to
Mandalay. It's up to you - both pieces of software are great. So I really hope that you enjoyed this video. If you have any questions or any comments or suggestions please leave them in the comments section or get in touch with us - our
email is hello@grad.coach. This is Derek from Grad Coach, signing
out.
