Academic Features

New citation editor for Windows Word plugin

Steve Ridout15 Comments

Last week we uploaded a development preview of Mendeley Desktop, which isn’t as stable as the proper release but allows adventurous users to try out the latest features. You can download it from the bottom half of: http://www.mendeley.com/download-mendeley-desktop/. And please, restart Mendeley Desktop after installing as the Word plugin doesn’t work when run from the installer (we will fix this!)

It includes a cool new citation feature for the Word plugin which makes adding and removing references much simpler. Eventually we will get it working on OpenOffice and on Mac Word, but first we’d like you Windows users to let us know how it works for you. Here’s the low down:

  1. When you need to insert a citation press ALT-M, or if you don’t like keyboard shortcuts (what’s wrong with you?!) click “Insert Citation”

  2. A box will appear where you can search by author name, title, and year for your reference.

  3. Select the reference using the cursor keys and Enter, or use the mouse (but seriously, keyboard is better :))
  4. Add more references if you need.

That’s it! Just press enter or click OK and the citation appears in your document, formatted in your chosen style.

If you decide to add or remove references from a citation later, place the cursor there and press ALT-M to open the citation editor box again.

And adding a bibliography at the end is just as simple as it’s always been, just click the “Insert Bibliography” button and all the references cited in your document will be inserted according to your chosen style. We’d love to get your feedback on this feature and the Word plugin in general so we can make it even more awesome.

15 thoughts on “New citation editor for Windows Word plugin”

  2. Wow, this looks incredibly useful. I second Jan’s reply; it will be great to have this working in Open Office. I prefer it over Word, especially because of the open source factor.

  5. It would be nice if you can insert a Bibliography without the need for a citation. Just so that I can list a bunch of References at the end that supplements my Bibliography.

  7. The biggest problem I have with Mendeley is that if you edit a citation through adding a page number or removing the author name, Mendeley no longer updates the citation automatically as it should do when, for example, you add another citation in the same document referring to an author with the same surname or another paper from the same year. This is a really fundamental flaw that for makes Mendeley unusable.

  8. The ideal way to solve this would be by fixing the display in either the source data or in the citation style file, so that edits on the document itself aren’t necessary. Until the style files and data are perfect, however, some document editing will be necessary. Until this is handled better, it’s probably best to wait until you’ve inserted all the references and then do all the edits at once.

  9. I think Mendeley is amazing, but the biggest problem I have with it is that I need more citation styles… (for example: Atmospheric Environment, ACP, Atmospheric Research and so on). It could be great to have a full access to all these styles!!!

  10. I agree that the largest issue I face is with editing citations – especially with removing author name. At least in my field, sociology, it is extremely common to cite only the publication date parenthetically, if the author is mentioned in the text. Without being able to edit this, my writing looks quite redundant. This should be an option when inserting citations (as the zotero “hide author name”)

  11. It works well when there more than two citations, but I cannot remove it when there is only on citation. For example, “it is …. (Tom 1999, Kart 2000)”. I can remove any one of them easily, but I cannot remove it when there is only one left.

  12. Hi sigmund. This is a bug, thanks for alerting us. Luckily though it is very easy to delete the whole citation by selecting and deleting it in Word without using the citation editor.

  13. Hi,

    I am having problem with mendeley desktop version. There is no option for Install Word Plugin in Menedely. I installed the new version from the link provided above in the post.

    I dont know if it would matter, but I installed Mendeley before installing Microsoft Word. And later I installed Microsoft Word. But in subsecuent installations of Mendeley, the word plugin option is not coming up. Is it possible to install the word plug sepparately?

  14. There is a problem with Mendeley 1.0.1 and Mac os 10.5.8 with Word 2008 integration. Prior to upgrading to Mendeley 1.0.1, I could use the MS Word plugin. Once I installed Mendeley 1.0.1 – even though the plugin is correctly installed (and has been re-installed along with everything restarted multiple times), and appears in the MS script file folder – it does not appear in the MSWORD script menu – and therefore I cannot cite. Please Help

Comments are closed.