Everyone is using Twitter these days. It’s a great way to communicate and keep up to date with your social network of friends and interests. Therefore, we thought you’d be interested in being able to hook up your Mendeley and Twitter account so that folks can keep up with your research interests and output.

Just follow these simple steps and you should have your Mendeley account connected to your Twitter account in no time.

1. Log into Mendeley Web (http://www.mendeley.com)
2. Go to the account details section.



3. Then select the Sharing/Importing tab.



4. Click on the “Connect” button. You will be sent to Twitter’s website so that you can authorize the connection. (Don’t worry, we do not have access to your Twitter details, that’s why you are sent to their website!)



5. You’ll be sent back to Mendeley after approving the connection on Twitter’s site.
6. You can now select which activities you perform in Mendeley will be tweeted in your Twitter account. Simply check or uncheck the boxes you want and click “Update settings”.

Here’s an example of a tweet of someone adding a new publication to their “My Publications” folder:

I just added my own publication: ‘Effects of gene flow on phenotype matching between two varieties of Joshua tree…’ mnd.ly/11Egj98

— Jeremy Yoder (@JBYoder) March 25, 2013

So there you go, you can now have Mendeley automatically tweet selected bits of your Mendeley activity. We look forward to reading your tweets!

Here are the previous entries in this twelve part 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• How to keep references and documents unpublished (out of catalog)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)
• How to merge contiguous citations with word plugin.
• How to search your notes (and other fields)

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

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

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

Features, many and useful features. That is what this blog post series is going to be about. If you’ve used Mendeley for a while, you’ll probably already have picked up on some of the following features and tips we’ll be showcasing over the next few weeks. However, I’m sure even some of these will be new to most of our readers, Mendeley veterans or newcomers.

Today’s how-to is a really nice and simple one: how to merge author names.

As you accumulate research papers and references in your library, you’ll find that sometimes the same author may be published with variations of the same name. P. Harvey, Pete Harvey, P. S. Harvey, etc. If this is in fact the same person, it becomes a bit of a mess if you want to filter your references by Author Name. In this case, you can use a simple technique to merge author names together to a single name of your choosing.
Here’s a quick step by step look at how this is accomplished:

1. In the top left panel, select “All Documents”.
2. Now, in the bottom left panel, scroll to the author name(s) you’d like to merge.
3. Select the author name that you want to change and drag it onto the name that you want to keep.
4. Click OK to accept the merge if that’s what you want.

Here’s a nice short video showing how this is done:

Our next entry in this twelve-part how-to series will show you how to easily drag and drop a PDF or PDF link into Mendeley Desktop for easy import. Stay tuned.

After the recent Webinars for CGIAR, we are happy to announce two free-for-all Webinars open to the general public. On Tuesday (February 23^rd, 5:00 pm GMT) and Wednesday (February 24^th, 9:30 pm GMT) Victor Henning, our director and co-founder and William Gunn, Community Liaison will demonstrate Mendeley’s collaborative features. There will be time for a Q&A session as well as a chance for you to share your experiences with Mendeley. To join, just pick one of the two webinars and pop over to the registration page to sign up.

Date: Tuesday, February 23rd 2010 Time: 5:00 pm GMT Presenter: William Gunn

Date: Wednesday, February 24th 2010 Time: 9:30 am GMT Presenter: Victor Henning

You’re a Mendeley power-user already? Then why not share this info with your friends and colleagues that are still looking for a free tool to manage their references and papers? They’ll thank you…