Mendeley Part 1: What is Mendeley?

ok everyone I'm gonna go through probably what I think is the most useful piece of software for any undergraduate or graduate student to date and the reason I say this is not necessarily because this software is amazing and I know that it is it's because all the things that it'll do for you now the software is called min delay and what I'm gonna do first is I'm just gonna kind of go through the basics of what is min delay and why should I use it and I don't know how long this video will take but I want to answer those two questions first now without getting technical run out of the gate I just kind of want to show you what min delay looks like this is my min delay this is my login I have an account on min delay calm and the accounts are free any student or anyone can register on min delay and start kind of building your citation database building your citations and keeping track of your bibliographies over time and this is all mentally really does but it does so much more than that that I'll probably have you sold on the software within the first few minutes of this video so in in technical terms Mendeley is a citation and reference manager now what does that mean well you know when us crazy professors make you write a thousand or two thousand or ten thousand word paper we always make you cite your sources well this organizes and tracks and keeps sort of keeps track of these sources that you have and as you can see here I've got a number of sources in here this is all my documents but it also allows you to organize your sources in a logical manner that means something to you now for those of you who know me you know that I do a lot of research on cyber terrorism cyber crimes things on the dark web critical infrastructure that's my area of expertise and that's what I do a lot of writing on so I have mine basically set up either by a class that I teach a course work that I teach at the University where I have it working on a paper that I'm working on with any number of other colleagues or people that I'm working on on my own so as to show you that I can show you all my documents and here are all of my documents and you can see there's a lot of documents in there now imagine me trying to remember all of those by hand and this is how we used to have to do it we used to print this stuff off or we'd keep a word document or an Excel spreadsheet or an Access database if you're really smart you kept those things if you weren't you kept the actual journals on your desk or in a bookshelf somewhere and you would bookmark them somehow or you'd put a sticky note in them you'd come back to and from these or worse you'd print them off and keep them in a separate file cabinet I mean this is just this is the transition of moving from a paper format to a digital format and this is much easier for you guys to do I wish I'd had this as an undergrad fortunately for me I transitioned to Mendeley at the graduate level it got it got to the point where it was extremely usable and I ditched another piece of software called EndNote forever and most people had to use EndNote in 2000 going forward because it was the only thing really available now there's a number of solutions out there but I really feel this is probably the best one for you one because it's free for students just period it's free for anybody but it's really really designed for students and for graduate students for self publishing authors that kind of thing they make their money when you're collaborating with other colleagues or other writers or researchers and honestly speaking their prices are extremely cheap for what they do I'll happily pay these prices in a heartbeat considering all the things that it does but let's let's take an example here currently I am working through a literature review on cyber victimization and I've just started this literature review so I'm really in the find everything I can phase and you'll know that phase because that's the phase where you have to go to all these databases and find articles it's actually my favorite phase it's my favorite part of doing any sort of research is going and finding what everybody else is read you would know this is the beginnings of a literature review and it's one of the things that students dread because you've got all these sources and oh my god you have to read some of them and you have to annotate them or get to put them into a lit review but really this is where Mendeley will shine for you first off if you're a grad student if you're working on a master's thesis some sort of policy paper or a for godsakes a dissertation you're going to want to have something that keeps track of your citations I recently helped a friend out and recover a hard drive I happen to be sort of geeky nerdy I used to be as a technician and recovering data off of a dead hard drive is definitely not what you want to do when you're staring down the barrel of a master's thesis or dissertation utilizing something like Mendeley specifically Mendeley keeps there's a certain peace of mind knowing that when you go to bed at night you're not going to wake up and all your research is gone especially if he spent a year or two years some researchers spend three or four years working on their dissertations or field research you certainly don't want to lose all that so everything that you see here is actually stored in the cloud I have an account and in fact I can come up here to options and we can see what my account usage is and you can see that I'm using three hundred and seventy-five Meg's of ten gigs now I have a little bit more because I I do this sort of thing I go out and I preach Mendeley from the highest mountaintops and so in in response to that Mendel he's been very kind to me and has given me what they call an extended account or they call it an adviser account so I get to do a little bit more with it but that's because I come out and I do things like this like making these videos so in this cyber victimization I have let's see if I can select all my articles I have 18 articles so far this is nowhere near even the beginning I estimated I'll probably have 30 or 40 sources to go through because I haven't checked these sources yet for additional stuff so what do I have here I have this journal for instance Jose Augustina I have the information about the article I have the journal the year the volume the issue the pages I have the abstract I have the keywords but more importantly I have the actual article now I go out to these databases and I'm going to show you how to do this in another video but I grab the article now what's nice about this is that Mendeley allows me to store the article with the citation and it's a little it doesn't seem like it's that tricky there's a couple of really good steps that if you follow through you'll never have a problem with this and once you learn how to do it doing it three or four times it makes it very easy for you so let's come back to this article now what's nice about this as you can see I've got I've got notes in here I can put a little sticky note use this in the introduction to make my case for an argument now that's actually a test one that I did a couple of days ago just to show somebody else but I'm gonna show a note here let's say for instance I come down to this this is probably how I really will make my notes ooh analyzing sex scenes from a criminology perspective that's actually on par with what I want to look in so go find this article Junior Agustina 2012 alright what does that do well if I come over here to my notes tab I can have all my notes every note that I make in the paper is listed here for instance this is a test note I'll just put the test note in here now this is all a bunch of stuff that comes built-in I'm just gonna delete that I can actually start writing my annotation here whoops I just can't touch it now you can use this area for anything you want to use it for I actually start my my annotation here of what the article is about I read the article and abstracted I highlight things oh did you know you could highlight things watch this no more printing out the article you don't have to print the article to write pen and paper on the side or highlight it with a highlighter you know I got really big hands highlighters don't always fit and I don't like the smell of them I don't have to worry about it so I can do this digitally and then just for grins I can sync it and when this little bar finishes not only will the citation and the article be uploaded to my account but so will the notes and the highlights so I can come back in here and you'll do this if you're writing any sort of large-scale paper you'll sleep between the time that you start writing this paper and the time that you find these sources you can just come back click on the note and it'll take you where do you want to go in the page this is extremely useful I don't know if you know how useful this is yet until you've actually done it but you get into these habits of writing and you get into these habits of doing research where you start working and then sooner or later especially if you're a grad student you fall asleep you may fall asleep in your chair you may fall asleep at your desk you may pass out it may be intentional it may be unintentional but you're gonna wake up and try to remember where you were making notes starting your annotation and saving all that information to the cloud is extremely useful because there are things in this world that will destroy your research dogs cats children children are extremely damaging to research and anybody who's researching who has children understands this things like tornadoes and hurricanes and fires and earthquakes having all this stuff stored in the cloud is peace of mind a computer can fail a laptop can fail a desktop can fail you can lose power all of these things are detrimental to your and there's no way to protect against them except storing your information in the cloud and that's what this does okay so that's kind of a rundown of what Mendeley can do and I can I can edit this I can put a star there I can put additional notes in here if for some reason the citation is wrong I can change it if you need DOI numbers you can add them in there you can search by do odd numbers and occasionally Mendeley is very kind to you and based on what you have in these folders or in this directory they'll send you emails on related articles which is really really nice I can break it down to what needs review I can put my own publications in there I can have things that are unsorted there's a number of things that you can use this for and just maintaining your articles now to a graduate student this is golden especially if you've never done it before to an undergraduate student I may not sell you yet but if you have plans on going to grad school really consider something like this now again I break it down by paper this is a cyber victimization paper here's my entire dissertation all the sources I used in my doctoral dissertation so why do I have you can see some of them are red like some no green dot some of them have a green dot which means I've never actually opened the article but that's okay some of them I didn't need the article I needed the citation and that's where this also really shines for undergrads so to show you that I'm actually gonna bring up word here I realized it's off screen oh I'll nail it down here a little bit for you okay as an example and again I'll show you how to get this working in a separate video and there are other videos online that will help you do this but I really want to sell you and I don't get paid for this this is this is that it's not like Mendeley sends me a check for every one of these guys I turn on I get nothing for this this is just me saying this is a really great tool for you to use so this is an example of how I like to cite while writing in my papers I had an article way back when well you know what I'll do this grammatically correct way back when in 2005 it was a very cool experience and I can't wait to get published again now I'm gonna cite my article all right where I clean this up just a little bit here and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna zoom in just so you can see how I do this now Mendeley works on the Mac and the PC so it doesn't really matter which one you're working on I have both I have a PC here at home I have a Mac and a PC at my office I used to a long time ago used to work for Apple and I'm a Meg Big Mac fan of a big windows fan I like them all but it doesn't really matter which one you're using because it works on both in on the Mac it's in a different spot but in Windows here under references I'm sorry it's uh no it should be right there so I may have to do this ah all right so you get a quick quick doing right here we're gonna save that document I will just throw this out to my desktop and instead we will open this back up I had to install the plug-in real quick again I'll show you how to do that in a different video but you see that min delay right here under the references tab is synced and integrated with word so I can actually say hey I'm looking for a citation and my last name is Copeland so go find whoops go find all the Copeland's there we go and this is well that's the that's the thesis and then you know what I'll show you a different video as well okay so it'll cite it based on the signing style that you like I happen to write in two styles I'll write in APA format and I write an I Triple E format so depending on my style I can go to APA sixth I can go to Hyatt Tripoli let's say you're one of those weird people who writes in Chicago style no offense I'm not judging but they're Chicago style what if you're an MLA style there's MLA so it allows you to flip in and out of your citation style ad nauseum just until you just get sick of looking at citation styles for undergrads this is useful because you have professors who will write ask you to write papers in one format versus professors who will rescue to write in another format and so it allows you to continuously work using some of the sources and switching between the styles that your professors ask for when it comes time for graduate work or even post graduate work having the ability to switch styles is extremely useful as you submit things to different journals some journals will require alternate styles again I have to write an APA format for social science journals and for technical journals like I Triple E Explorer or some of those I have to write an I Triple E format so it's it's very useful to be able to switch styles and there are more styles let's say you have a some obscure style that you need to write it in you can probably find it this usually covers most of them but you could find it online very quickly and integrate it back in now I'm going to just throw up some authors here let's let's not just cite me let's cite some other people and I'm gonna go back to my dissertation here I like grover he was that was a great article and then let's go yes and then why not let's throw in you this is article I'm looking at right now and then let's throw in yen for case work case study research and you can see that it kind of follows it in there's a really great things that this will do it understands the first used versus second use if you don't know what that means here's a great example when we publish this it was three of us so the first time you use it it understands it the second time that you use it it knows to follow the at all format so it all three authors in the first one the second time it does it in terms of the at all Mendeley is very smart like that again this is all programming lead unde and it's probably the best tool out there now here's where it gets really fun and just to show you how I'm gonna do this I'm going to insert a page break so we can come down usually the last page of your paper is your reference page or e NCE whoops I'm not a very good typer or it's a bibliography or something to that effect now I've got one two three four five six I've got six articles in here in various order I mean there's no particular order to this but I'm writing an APA format which means this should be a hanging indent which means the first line is normal second lines indented by half an inch and it'll be alphabetical that's how it should work so if I come in here and I see this button up here that says insert bibliography what this button will do is it will take all of the sources from here until here and it'll insert them right here and as you can see it did that a couple of things that need to be fixed in these like you know I don't necessarily need the fact that I found my own dissertation in Pro but you get the idea and if you look the titles are are italicized the number of the in volume are the volume in number are italicized all the author's the title should be like this it some of them may change over time but we can I can show you how to fix those but every one of these is well I think most of these are correct in terms of APA format you get the first line hanging indent for each line after that they are off abetik oh I didn't put them enough better go order mandalay did that for me here's where it gets really kind of great I'm gonna insert yet another article here and here I want to take a letter I don't have let's see I don't have any Kay's or I don't have any let's pick like a P or an end K P you're in so that way it'll be between Grover and Ross I'm gonna look for an article with a starts with a K or an n so let me come up here and insert a citation how about oh no it's a G how about so you may recognize some of these out Nordahl in let's add that one and you can see that these three authors have been added I'm probably mispronouncing it but it starts with an N and it should just pop up right here automatically in place there's no reason to do your bibliographies by hand I you'll forget something you'll not do something and you'll do something incorrectly you'll forget the the way it's done you may not italicize something correctly Mendeley takes that heavy lifting away from you and gets you focusing back to this gets you focusing back to writing the article and that's where the real strength of this document and this program comes in is that it gets this part off your mind and gets you back into this part and it allows you to edit it I can come back in here and add some more work let me let's pick an offer here and just find well how about that one follow follow let's try below I'm gonna insert it follow here I'm gonna insert the citation button yeah let's enter that one and there it is you can see there to the top I can insert multiple authors let's insert mr. Albany very well-known author J Albanese and then I'll insert him twice as he's got multiple multiple stuff going on there oh you know what I've only got the the first one all right that's fine we'll just do that you can see that Albanese replaced by allah's first so again it'll do it as you write it and that's why it's called Mendel a sight o matic it does it while you write sighting while you write is the absolute best way to not forget the citations in the text and at the same time build your reference page this is usually what sells the undergrads it'll sell the grads too I mean don't get me wrong graduate students will look at this and go why didn't anybody show me this before well that's because nobody really need to show you that's what I do that's why I can do these things so take a look at this and get get familiar with it I'm gonna show you some more videos how to install it how to link it how to pull citations down from various databases in fact I make my videos up for my undergrad students I make them learn how to grab the citations while they're finding their articles in their lit review and then focus on that and then I'll show them how to do this so if you're coming in from that perspective just stay tuned there are more videos coming I'm gonna try to get three or four of these videos up this weekend but hopefully this will be some help and if you don't know more about it all you need to do is go to let me just bring up in the thing goto min delay comm you can get all the information you need from min delay calm I'll bring it up nice and see they get all this free advertisement for me and I would do it in a heartbeat all day long for them just because they saved me hours of my life I will never get back so you can sign in you can create an account you can download again free account you just need to download the software and link it up this is absolutely some of the best software out there for for people doing research for people whether or not you're working on a degree finished a degree you're working on a thesis or dissertation go get Mendeley go download it for your Mac or your PC and welcome to the easier way of doing things certainly the smarter way of doing things okay I hope you found this video helpful again more videos are coming soon and I'm looking forward to answering some of your questions about how to use Mendeley and how to make your life a lot easier and get focused on what you need to focus on

Channel: Dr. Chris Copeland

Views: 148,430

Keywords: Mendeley, Research, Undergrad, Grad student, Citations

Id: pxgwBZMGq8k

Length: 25min 4sec (1504 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 25 2017