Tag: Microsoft Word

How-to series: How to merge contiguous citations with word plugin [part 9 of 12]

Ricardo Vidal1 Comment

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:

Bibliographies here, bibliographies there, bibliographies anywhere!

Ricardo Vidal13 Comments

If you are currently a Mendeley Desktop user, you will have already noticed that it comes with built-in plug-ins for Microsoft Word and OpenOffice Writer. These plug-ins are really useful for adding citations to your Word/Writer documents and build your bibliography dynamically.

Now, what if you happen to want to add a bibliography section in a document other than MS Word or OO Writer? No problem, we’ve got that covered! You have two options: copy & paste or drag & drop. Both alternatives are very similar.

First you open Mendeley Desktop and select the list of papers or references you would like to include in your bibliography (You can select as many references as you want). Use the normal multiple selection keys you would use to select multiple files in a folder elsewhere on your computer. In my case I’m a Windows/Linux user, so I press and hold the Ctrl key while I highlight the references I want to include.

Once you have all the desired references selected, you should pick which option you prefer: copy & paste or drag & drop.

Mendeley Desktop

To drag & drop, you simply use your mouse to drag the selected references all at once to your document of choice (text document, blog entry form, Google Doc, e-mail etc.) and drop them where you would like them to be listed. You’ll notice they are nicely numbered and formatted. How convenient!

If you prefer to copy & paste, just simply press Crtl+C or go to the menu option Edit > Copy citation and then paste your reference list wherever you like. Yes, also neatly ordered and formatted!

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As mentioned before, you can copy & paste or drag & drop references into virtually any application or location that allows you to write text. Give it a try, use it to add references in your blog post, an email or anywhere else!

And yes, we know how much you long for the Word plugin for Mac… bear with us!