I recently had an opportunity to attend the Experimental Biology meeting in San Diego. The Experimental Biology comprises 7 scientific societies who come together to have one (HUGE!) meeting once a year. There was tons of interesting science reported, from the science of Yogic breathing to the effects of fructose on the body, but most relevant to the Mendeley community as a whole was the panel discussion on communicating your science. The panel included a Nobel Laureate, Paul Berg, Joe Palca from NPR’s Science Friday, Megan Palmer from SynBERC, and Cara Santa Maria from the Huffington Post. This was a diverse panel and got quite exciting towards the end.

Paul Berg shared a long historical perspective on communicating science to the public, starting from his work on recombinant DNA to more modern issues like the H5N1 Avian Influenza pandemic scare. It’s because of the work of people like Berg that scientists were able to develop recombinant DNA technology, and the biotech boom is largely due to recombinant DNA technology. In some parallel universe, scientists didn’t manage to communicate the safety and risks of recombinant DNA to the public and in that universe, techniques which form the basis for the most commonplace and routine tasks in a biology lab are encumbered with regulations or agaist the law. To avoid a situation like this arising with future research, Berg says communicating science is equally important as writing papers and grants. If the government outlaws research on a topic, not even the most well-written grant on that topic can get funded. Berg ended with a call for more non-scientist members of the public to be present at policy discussions to make sure careful thought is given to concerns that may not be obvious to scientists. He left open the issue of how to best address those concerns. Does he think it’s just a question of education of the public or is there a need for more understanding among scientists about how policy is made and what ethical concerns may arise? He also returned to the importance of communicating your science to the public in a rather spectacular way during the Q&A. More on that in a bit.

Joe Palca was an interesting speaker because he started as a lab tech & went to grad school, but moved into communications in the face of the dry research climate of the early 80s. He had some great advice for scientists talking to reporters. For example, big science news of broad general appeal comes around maybe several times a year, whereas many reporters have several deadlines a day. Because of this, and because the media generally has a hard time distinguishing between science news that’s really important and that which just has the right PR spin, he says the way the news model works for the general media just doesn’t work for science and science communicators have to figure out a better way. More on that in a bit, too. His best advice for scientists (and one of the most retweeted quotes) was for scientists to stop putting down other scientists who are good at communicating.

Megan Palmer shared her policy experience, making the point that communication to government and policy makers operates on a very different set of rules than other forms of communication and encouraging scientists to make themselves available for sharing their expertise with policy makers while understanding that policy makers may have an infuriating set of priorities relative to the needs of the research.

Cara opened with the line, “I’m from Huff Post, don’t throw anything at me”, alluding to the parade of pseudoscientific nonsense that frequently stains the pages of that publication. She needn’t have bothered, though, because no one laughed and she went on to give some of the most memorable and useful advice of the whole session, talking candidly about the need for a publication with lay readers to answer the “how does your work affect the world?” question that is rarely addressed by scientists doing basic research. She had quite a bit to say about understanding your audience and learning how to communicate with them as opposed to just talking at them. The most popular sentence of the whole session was “Don’t underestimate your audience’s intelligence, but do underestimate their vocabulary.” In other words, drop the jargon if you want the public to get what you’re saying. She finished by touching on the scientist-reporter dynamic and how social media allows scientists to get around the fear of being misquoted by allowing researchers to communicate directly to the public, even if you have little audience.

There were some interesting questions that dug a little deeper into the issues touched on above. Palca talked about the power of anecdotes in communication, despite their statistical invalidity. “If someone’s friend’s brother’s kid got a measles shot and later developed some strange disease, that person is likely to believe the measles shot caused it, despite all the evidence to the contrary.” I’ve personally had discussions that went almost exactly like this & I know many of you must have had as well.

Sparks didn’t really fly until towards the very end, though, when Berg broached the topic of scientific self-promotion. After about 30 minutes of discussion about the importance of communicating with the public and how the media tries but often can’t and sometimes doesn’t want to get the science right, Berg says he thinks all scientist communication should be filtered through the media and that it’s inappropriate for a scientist to blog about their research. Scicurious is certain that Berg got his Nobel by toiling away in the lab and doing no self-promotion whatsoever. Others pointed out that a blog is exactly what science communication needs – it helps a scientist learn public communication skills, it gives a scientist the ability to get the story right, and provides the perfect defense against the fear of being misquoted or senationalized by a reporter.

What do you think? Is it just a cultural shift or an attempt by older scientists who’ve already made it to keep the attention for themselves?

One of the great built-in features in Mendeley is without a doubt the citation plugin for your word processor of choice. We currently support most of popular word processors such as MS word (Mac and Windows), OpenOffice, Neo Office, and Libre Office. We’re continuously working to improve the efficiency and general user interface of this plugin because we feel it is an important component within Mendeley Desktop and your overall research workflow.

That being said, I’d like to touch on a small aspect that many Mendeley citation plugin users are probably unaware of. If you add multiple citations at the same time, the appropriate citation style is used for such situations. For example, if you were citing 3 articles and they were the 3rd, 4th and 5th citations added, they’d probably be added as follows 3-5 (if using a numeric inline citation style format like “Nature Genetics”.). However, if you went in to the document and wanted to add another reference in that bundle, it would show up as 3-5 6. That is not good.
Quick solution? Delete the citations and add all four together. Which would mean remembering which reference they were, selecting all four and adding them in again.

Better solution? Merge the citations! Just select the 3-5 and 6 citation and then go to your citation plugin options in your word processor and select Merge citations. The end result should be 3-6. No need to go track down the references again. Just select, merge. Done.

Check out this quick 2 minute video showcasing our Word plugin:

Here are the previous eight entries in our How-to series:

• How to merge author names
• How to drag and drop PDF links into Mendeley for direct download
• Generate BibTeX files for your collections for use in LaTeX
• How to check for duplicate entries and merging
• How to copy & paste formatted citations anywhere (LaTeX too!)
• How to add supplementary data to references
• How to keep references and documents unpublished (out of catalog)
• How to export your annotations (alone or with your PDF)

Calling all librarians and information science professionals! Come learn about how researchers at your institution are using Mendeley and how you can use it to help patrons find what they’re looking for faster. This session is appropriate for folks with no prior experience, but we’ll also go in depth in some areas and there will be plenty of time for questions, so feel free to join just for Q&A if you like. Please download and install Mendeley before the session so if you have any questions, you’ll be able to ask them during the event.

We’ll discuss topics such as: Read more »

In the eighth entry to our How-to series, we look at the built-in PDF viewer within Mendeley Desktop.
We (and many others) think that Mendeley is a great tool to organize your research documents. It’s also a great application to allow you to read, annotate and highlight your PDFs too! The built-in PDF viewer allows multiple open documents, highlighting, post-it-like note taking and more.
If you double-click an entry for which you have the PDF document available, you will then be able to view the document in the built-in PDF reader. You can have multiple PDFs open simultaneously, each in their own tab. Like most PDF viewers, you have the general tools that allow you to pan, zoom, read in full screen, etc. You can also annotate these documents. Highlight by selection, or by adding boxes. Add post-it-like notes in localized sections of the article and even leave article wide notes in the box in the right-hand panel.
Read more »

Changing how research is done is a very big task, and we can’t do it alone. We’re particularly appreciative of our development partners who are working with us to chip away at the problems hindering research efficiency today. One problem is sifting through the volume of search results to find the most important and timely results. Jason Priem of Total Impact is working on this problem at the School for Information Science at the University of North Carolina. He and his colleagues are doing a study to determine if scholarly search can be improved by personalizing search results based on the previous reading history of the scholar — that’s where you come in. If you’re willing to share your academic search and paper reading history to improve science, sign up for his study!
Read more »

As you probably know that, whenever you add a document to your Mendeley library, the document details for that entry are aggregated into our Mendeley databases so as to allow you to easily synchronize your library across multiple platforms. These aggregated data are also used to generate our extensive and multidisciplinary research catalog that is continually growing, fueled by the ongoing uploading of references to your (and everyone else’) library.

This is all good and well but how about documents you don’t want to include in the catalog, or you don’t think are actually useful for others to have access via the research catalog? For those cases, we have a checkbox in the Document Details panel that allows you to keep that entry from being aggregated. It will still be synchronized across your multiple devices, but it will not have the Document Details aggregated to our research catalog.
There are plenty of situations where this can be useful. Notes from a class that you are storing and don’t believe are useful for others, manuscripts you are currently working on and therefore are still incomplete, etc.

In summary, if you’re adding a document and you don’t want the document details to be anonymously aggregated and made available for search in our research catalog, then go ahead and click on the “Unpublished work” checkbox in the Document Details panel on the right.

There you go, simple stuff once again. In our next entry we’ll be touching on the topic of annotations.

Here are the previous six entries in our How-to series:

• How to merge author names
• How to drag and drop PDF links into Mendeley for direct download
• Generate BibTeX files for your collections for use in LaTeX
• How to check for duplicate entries and merging
• How to copy & paste formatted citations anywhere (LaTeX too!)
• How to add supplementary data to references

Here we are, at the halfway point of our twelve-part how-to blog series. This one will be another quick look at something our members sometimes don’t realize. Your library can contain more than just references and PDFs!

There are nearly a dozen different ways to add references to your Mendeley library. Reference entries can have a file associated with them or not. In other words, your entries can be just document details or also contain the respective PDF, Word, PPT or other document format.

One thing that many don’t realize is that you can actually have multiple documents attached to a single reference entry. A good and recurring example of this is having a reference with attached PDF and supplementary data files. Useful, right? I know!

Here’s how you add multiple documents to a single references:

1. Click on an entry in your library.
2. Look at the right-hand panel which contains the document details
3. Scroll down to where the attachment field is.
4. Attach one or multiple documents to that entry. Done.

You will notice that the entry in your library will show a different icon from the entries with one or no attached documents.

Previous How-to series entries:

• How to merge author names
• How to drag and drop PDF links into Mendeley for direct download
• Generate BibTeX files for your collections for use in LaTeX
• How to check for duplicate entries and merging
• How to copy & paste formatted citations anywhere (LaTeX too!)

Have you ever had to quickly send a reference to someone by email or instant message (IM)? How about send a list of references at once? This can be quite a task if you have to open each PDF, copy the title, author, journal, year, etc. And format them in an email or IM reply.
For these cases, and anywhere you’d like to rapidly copy and paste one or multiple references, Mendeley Desktop has got you covered.
Here’s how:

1. Open Mendeley Desktop.
2. Find the folder or group of references you are interested.
3. Select one or more entries using your mouse (you might need to use CTRL, SHIFT and/or CMD to select multiple entries)
4. Use the keyboard shortcut CTRL+C (CMD+C for Mac) to copy. Alternatively you can use the menu “Edit > Copy”.
5. In your email, IM, Google Docs or any other text editing field, paste the content you just copied. Do so by pressing CTRL+V (CMD+V for Mac) or the menu “Edit > Paste”.
6. There you have it! Formatted references in a few quick steps. Select references, copy, and paste.

Quick note for those paying closer attention: you can also copy the references as LaTeX so the crafty LaTeX users can also enjoy the fun (CTRL+K or CMD+K for Mac)!
Another quick note: You can change the default formatting used in Mendeley Desktop by going to the menu “View > Citation Style”. There are quite a few styles to select from, so enjoy.

Stay tuned for the next entry in this twelve-part series of how-to posts. We’ll be going over supplementary data.

Previous How-to series entries:

• How to merge author names
• How to drag and drop PDF links into Mendeley for direct download
• Generate BibTeX files for your collections for use in LaTeX
• How to check for duplicate entries and merging

Here goes the fourth entry of our twelve-part how-to series. Let us take a look at how you to look for duplicate entries and merging whenever we do come across repeat entries.

As your reference library grows, it can happen that you add the same research article to your library more than once. Sometimes you’ll have a preprint and the final published example added. In general, Mendeley does its best to avoid having duplicate entries in your library and will tend to merge entries when they have the exact same metadata. However, every now and then some research articles make it in twice with minor differences between them that Mendeley Desktop can’t detect immediately. For these cases, you can go ahead and use the deduplication tool.

This tool, is quite self explanatory, however there are some details you may want to take note of: 1) it’s context specific. Meaning that it will only look for duplicates within the collection or folder you have currently selected; 2) It provides you with the option to select the document details you want to keep from each of the duplicates, thus allowing to maximize the completeness of your documents’ details;

So how do you use the deduplication tool? Here’s a quick run-down:

1. In Mendeley Desktop, select the folder which you’d like to search for duplicates. It can be “All Documents”, a specific folder or even a sub-folder.
2. Go to you Tools menu and select Deduplication tool.
3. You will see a listing of the duplicates found (if any!). Select the one you’d like to examine and notice the checkboxes next to the document details in the right-hand panel.
4. Select the details that you would like to keep from each of the documents.
5. Click merge to stay with one only merged entry containing the complete document details in your library only once.
6. Select the next duplicate set of references and repeat steps 3-5.

Here are a couple short videos exemplifying how this feature works. Nothing like an organized library of references, huh?

How to find duplicates:

How to merge duplicate entries:

Our next entry will show you how to quickly copy and paste formatted citations anywhere!

Previous How-to series entries:

• How to merge author names
• How to drag and drop PDF links into Mendeley for direct download
• Generate BibTeX files for your collections for use in LaTeX

Keeping up with our twelve-part how-to series, this entry will provide you with a simple walk through of how to get Mendeley Desktop generating BibTeX files of your library or folders for use in your LaTeX documents.

The majority of us use word processors to write our essays, manuscripts and thesis. However, there are a crafty group of folks that like to use LaTeX, a document markup language and document preparation system. What most of us already know is that Mendeley comes with a built-in word plugin that works on most major word processors. What some might not know is that Mendeley can also generate BibTeX files for your reference collections/folders. Thus, making citing references a breeze. If you happen to use LaTeX to prepare your documents, here’s where you’ll find the options to create your BibTeX files on the fly:

1. Go to the Mendeley Preferences menu
2. Click on the BibTeX tab
3. Select the options that fit your needs. One big BibTeX file, one per collection, etc.
4. Click “Apply”.
5. That’s it, your BibTeX files should be ready for you to reference in your LaTeX documentos.

The next entry in our quick-read how-to series will show you a thing or two about keeping your library neatly organized without duplicate entries.

Previous How-to series entries:

• How to merge author names
• How to drag and drop PDF links into Mendeley for direct download